Zomato 17 million user accounts hacked, check if you are a victim

Zomato, the popular food delivery app, has fallen prey to a hack and has lost the user account details of 17 million of its users to hackers. In the meanwhile, the restaurant profiling and food delivery app has released a security notice for all its users providing guidelines to keep their data safe.

Zomato was launched back in 2008 and has been one of the successful start-ups that have been able to ride on India's economic growth. The impact of this new development hasn't surfaced yet but it could hamper the company's growth considering the growing competition in the food sector. Swiggy, Foodpanda, Faasos and even Uber are few of the brands that are giving a stiff competition to Zomato.

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With India's growing dependency on internet services, it is also getting increasingly vulnerable to cyber-threats and attacks. Earlier this week, a ransomware by the name of Wannacry has created havoc across the globe and India has been termed as one of the worst affected countries in the world.  Though the government has assured that there has been no major incident, apart from a few isolated attempts in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, cyber experts claim that many instances are going unreported due to the use of pirated software .

Here's what you can do to stay safe from the recent hack:

• Initially, to check if you are one of the 17 million Zomato users affected by the hack, you need to log in to your account
• If you're able to log in successfully, the chances are that you haven't come under the scope of the attack
• If you're logged out automatically and your old password is not being accepted, the chances are that you've been attacked by the hackers
• The company claims that they have changed passwords of the affected users and logged them out to avoid any more theft of data
• However, if you use the same password for many accounts and apps, it will be advisable that you change the passwords and use separate passwords for each application/account
  
• To revive your Zomato account, you can use your registered email ID to reset the password
  
• Use a fresh password for your account and try using a random order of alphabets, numerical and special characters for added safety.