Jeremy Kirk:
Adobe said Wednesday it is investigating the release of 230 names, email addresses and encrypted passwords claimed to have been stolen from a company database.
The information was released on Tuesday on Pastebin by a self-proclaimed Egyptian hacker named “ViruS_HimA.” The hacker, who claimed the database accessed holds more than 150,000 records, posted links to several websites hosting a text file with 230 records.
“We have seen the claim and are investigating,” said Wiebke Lips, senior manager with Adobe’s corporate communications.
Read more on Computerworld.
The hacker notes:
I have Hacked into one of Adobe servers, Gained full access to it, Dumped the Database, It contains over 150,000 Emails,Passwords with full data for a lot of Adobe customers and partners including Emails and Passwords for “Adobe Employees”, “US Military”, “USAF”, “Google”, “Nasa”, “.Edu” and many many more companies around the world! [In depth details will be sent to Adobe Security Team]
The passwords are not in clear text, and Kirk reports that they are MD5 hashes, some of which the reporter was able to easily decrypt using free online tools.
Why Adobe? The hacker offers this explanation:
Adobe is a very big company but they don’t really take care of them security issues, When someone report vulnerability to them, It take 5-7 days for the notification that they’ve received your report!!
It even takes 3-4 months to patch the vulnerabilities!
such big companies should really respond very fast and fix the security issues as fast as they can.
I guess I’ll wait to see if I get a notification letter from Adobe.
Update: I won’t be getting any letter, but Adobe has confirmed that they were breached. Reuters reports:
Adobe Systems Inc shut down a website where customers share information about using its Connect online conferencing service after the software maker discovered it had been compromised in a data breach.
The company, whose software is frequently targeted by computer hackers because it is widely used to publish digital documents, said on Wednesday that it would reset passwords of the approximately 150,000 members of the site, Connectusers.com.