Breach, Data Security, Incident Response, TDR, Vulnerability Management

More than 800,000 accounts compromised in MacRumors Forums breach

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About 860,000 members who post on the forums of popular Apple website MacRumors are being asked to change their passwords after accounts were compromised in a hack.

How many victims? About 860,000.

What type of personal information? Usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords.  

What happened? An attacker hacked the forums and gained access to user credentials.

What was the response? An investigation is ongoing with a third party security researcher. A MacRumors administrator posted about the hack, alerting users of the incident and encouraging them to update their information. MacRumors is working to make the website more secure.

Details: A moderator account was logged into and used by the attacker to escalate privileges and steal user credentials. The hack was likened to the July breach of Ubuntu Forums, when an attacker compromised two million accounts after gaining access to a moderator account and taking advantage of vulnerabilities in vBulletin.

Quote: “We are still working to get the forums fully functional and more secure,” Arnold Kim, MacRumors editorital director, said in the notification. “Again, we are very sorry for the breach.”

Source: macrumors.com, “MacRumors Forums: Security Leak,” Nov. 12, 2013

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