Ekspress Grupp
Company Announcement

The Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate has started official investigations about the security leak of personal data of Alio.lt

The State Data Protection Inspectorate has launched an official investigation due to a cyber-attack against the online advertising portal Alio.lt that was identified last Wednesday, 13^th July 2022. Attempts were made to pull user data from the portal database. Trying to guess user IDs and phone numbers. A total of 345,095 users were attacked. The information was transferred to the State Data Protection Inspectorate, the National Cyber Security Center, the Computer Incident Investigation Service, and the Police in Lithuania.

The users have provided their phone number, e-mail address, and created a password to log-in, no other data is stored by the portal. The passwords are hashed.

The attack has been completely stopped and all measures have taken to remedy the situation. The high-level security measures have been applied for users to continue safely using the services of the ad portal Alio.lt.

All Alio.lt users were promptly informed about the incident and received e-mails and SMS messages informing them about the cyber-attack, their leaked password hashes have already been reset. Alio.lt users are strongly recommended to change their passwords of social networks or other accounts, because with the former password of the Alio.lt user, hackers can try to guess the passwords of other user accounts and reveal more personal data about the users.

The Lithuanian advertising portal Alio.lt was acquired by Ekspress Grupp in 2012. Alio.lt has approximately 346 000 users and it generated revenues of around 170 thousand euros in 2021. The information infrastructure of Alio.lt is separate from other group portals.

Kaspar Hanni
AS Ekspress Grupp
Group’s Development Director, Board Member
+372 669 8381
kaspar.hanni@egrupp.ee

AS Ekspress Grupp is the leading Baltic media group whose key activities include web media content production, publishing of newspapers, magazines and books. The Group also operates an electronic ticket sales platform and ticket offices in Estonia and Latvia. Ekspress Grupp that launched its operations in 1989 employs more than 1400 people, owns leading web media portals in the Baltic States and publishes the most popular daily and weekly newspapers as well as the majority of the most popular magazines in Estonia.