vBulletin.com hacked is the latest news going around, there seems to have been a spate of these lately, with huge numbers of user accounts leaked. Thankfully this time, the passwords are actually hashed, but with what algorithm – we aren’t quite sure. Perhaps someone could figure it out with HashTag.
I do have some vBulletin forums as well, so I got the e-mail below:
“We take your security and privacy very seriously. Very recently, our security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of forum user information, possibly including your password. Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We have taken the precaution of resetting your account password. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused but felt that it was necessary to help protect you and your account.”
Apparently they are using some kind of salted hash, so the password hashes should be fairly robust. But with the speed of hash brute forcing, any weak passwords should be discovered fairly quickly.
Forumware giant vBulletin.com has admitted that it’s been turned over by hackers who made off with customer user IDs and encrypted passwords.
vBulletin said it was resetting account passwords in response the the breach, which it blamed on a series of “sophisticated attacks”:
It’s unclear what form of “password encryption” vBulletin actually used. In particular it’s unknown if the forum followed industry best practice and stored passwords only in a hashed digest format together with a pinch of salt as a defence against rainbow table-style brute-force attempts to decode its (now leaked) user credential database.
In any case, users who inadvisedly choose the same password for vBulletin as elsewhere also need to change their password at the second location – this time to something different from anything they use elsewhere.
Another reminder not to reuse passwords, use weak passwords etc. It comes shortly after some large forums (like MacRumours) were hacked, forums using vBulletin – which leads some to believe there is a pretty nasty 0-day for vBulletin out there.
This has been supported by the fact that such an exploit is for sale on various exploit marketplaces by a group called Inj3ct0r Team. I’ve seen no reports so far though on the validity of the exploit for sale, and could it be what caused these compromises.
The disclosure of a breach at vBulletin comes a week after forum site MacRumors (which runs on vBulletin) was hacked, exposing the credentials of more than 860,000 users. In a statement acknowledging the compromise, MacRumours apologised for the breach and advised commentards to change up their passwords.
The attacks against MacRumors and vBulletin may be linked.
A hacking group called Inj3ct0r Team claimed responsibility for both the MacRumours and vBulletin attacks before offering to sell the vulnerability exploit used – supposedly targeting an unpatched security hole in multiple versions of vBulletin’s server software – for $700 a pop through various exploit marketplaces, The Hacker News reports.
The quality and provenance of the goods on sale remains unclear, but even the possibility that the sale could lead to widespread attacks against online forums has given some site admins the jitters. Hacking conference DEF CON, for one, has suspended its forums as a precaution, pending the availability of a suitable patch; a move it is making out of an abundance of caution and during its quiet season, months before its annual hacker jamboree in Las Vegas.
https://forum.defcon.org/ was also taken down for a while until the whole thing got sorted out. You can find the code for sale on the groups site here for $7000USD:
vBulletin v4.x.x and 5.х.x Shell Upload / Remote Code Execute (0day)
Let’s see who pops next.
Source: The Register
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