Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
A hacker or hackers has allegedly stolen more than 1.4 million passwords, email addresses, and other data from the databases of popular forums including Web Hosting Talk, and Mac Forums and HotScripts.
Someone who goes by the name “uid0” is offering to sell the three databases on the dark web underground market The Real Deal for a combined 7.2 bitcoin (approximately $4,752 at the current conversion rate), as first reported by CSO.
Read more on Motherboard.
uid0 told Softpedia or The Register it was a vBulletin zero-day. Almost any forum hack these days is a vBulletin installation. Guess I have to migrate before it happens to me. It would be nice if the press would stop writing about these articles. All of these breaches look like ads for underground marketplaces.
You’re gonna hate my last post, then, but seriously, I do want to alert people who might be might have reused passwords across sites and might not see any notification.
Don’t get me wrong but most of those forums were dead. Don’t think Penton cares.
I wouldn’t be surprised. But people do re-use passwords, so I do mention these things.
The VBulletin is free and it is a matter of time before someone figures out another hole to punch in that software. I wonder if there is any corporate internal fuzzing that performed before a new update is shipped. Some one some where has Vbulletin’s number, and this pops up one every 12 to 18 months. So Vbulletin is missing something major.
One other thing, if the Vbulletin runs in conjunction with PHP, there are ways to lock down the PHP scripts to keep the kiddies and bots out. Check the PHP security practices and ensure they are locked down.This will prevent most issues on forums that run software built on or with PHP.