Thanks to the reader who sent in a link to this announcement from Cerulean. Without comment (I think readers can guess what it would be)
What happened?
On July 4th, 2016, a security breach and data disclosure related to a single server that powered the now-retired blog and forums occurred. We became aware of the breach the next day, July 5th, 2016, and immediately shut down the machine and retired it permanently for further forensic analysis. The vulnerability was specific to our deployment of vBulletin, and the intruders used this vulnerability to also extract information from our WordPress blog. Information taken was limited to the user databases, including salted MD5 hashed passwords, for both our WordPress blog and vBulletin forums. Because both of these services had already been deprecated and were only kept online for archival purposes, most of the data was anywhere from 3 to 14 years old. The resulting likelihood of the data being useful to an attacker is therefore much lower unless you’ve used the same password for many years across multiple sites.
If your information for either our blog or forums was taken, you should have received, or will receive, an email from us notifying you of the incident and pointing you to this FAQ.
Am I affected?
Only those customers who had specifically registered to post comments on our blog or participate on our forums were impacted. No actual Trillian intrusion took place in terms of Trillian passwords, Trillian account data, Trillian messaging data (including cloud history), or Trillian billing information. Because the blog and forums were running third-party code in the form of WordPress and vBulletin, we carefully isolated them from the rest of our network many years ago.
What do I need to do?
If you used the same password on our forums or blog as you do Trillian itself, we urge you to change your Trillian password ASAP. Instructions for changing your Trillian password can be found here. In addition, if you used the same password on our forums or on our blog as you do anywhere else on the internet, we also urge you to also change that password ASAP. While the stolen passwords were hashed, modern computational power makes targetting a specific password well within the realm of possibility. Practice password safety by always using a different password for each site and taking advantage of a password manager to make doing so bearable.
Next steps?
Because the impacted machine has been taken offline completely and will stay offline, the major ongoing concern for customers is if your blog or forum password was shared with another service, including Trillian itself. Please feel free to contact us directly with any additional questions or concerns, and please accept our sincere apologies. We’re working internally to address the incident and making every effort to ensure nothing like it happens again.