Australian enterprise software firm Atlassian has told customers that it recently suffered a security breach that saw hackers access names, usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords for users of its HipChat group messaging application.

According to Craig Davies, who heads up Atlassian’s security team, “a very small percentage” (less than 2%) of the firm’s customers are affected.

No evidence has been found that the hackers managed to access payment information – which is obviously a relief.

In further good news, if you chose a strong, hard-to-guess password hackers are going to find it difficult to crack.

While HipChat passwords are one-way encrypted (hashed and salted), as an added precaution we have triggered a password reset for all affected HipChat user accounts and all Atlassian services that share the same email address.

When a password is properly salted and hashed, it goes through a one-way process which can not be easily reversed. Indeed, it can take...(continued)