Current multi-billion dollar valuation media darling of the month – Slack – just announced “unauthorized access to a Slack database storing user profile information”. In other words, Slack was hacked. According to a post, a small number of accounts showed suspicious activity and those users were notified. In response to the hack, Slack has created a two factor authentication option.
You can read more about how to activate two factor authentication on your Slack account here. Unfortunately, you cannot require all users on your Slack team to implement two factor though you can reset everyone’s password.
Slack is popular group chat service which has grown in popularity due to the ease at which a work team may be created as well as public and private discussion groups. Users on teams can freely select to join public groups or they can be invited into private ones. The concept is similar to Yammer except Slack is easier for an end-user to set up and the discussions are not threaded so there is no easy way of replying to someone’s discussion from yesterday morning which creates a sense of urgency to keep up with the messages in Slack before they scroll by and you cannot easily reply. Slack is also popular because it integrates with many services such as IFTTT and Twitter to pull in content so teams working together can have common notifications in one area.