Robinhood app hit by data breach exposing users’ emails, names

San Francisco: Robinhood Markets Inc. warned users that a hacker talked their way past the stock-trading app’s defences, stealing millions of user email addresses and more.

The culprit called customer support and, pretending to be an authorized party, duped a Robinhood employee into providing access to the customer support computer system, a hacker technique referred to as “social engineering”, the company said in a blog post. After stealing information from Robinhood, the hacker tried to extort payment from the company, which opted to alert police and warn users about the data breach, according to the post.