14 DAY TRIAL // On Sunday, Maxney of the Turkish Ajan hacker collective, announced that he had managed to breach a distributor website that apparently belonged to Avast Germany (avadas.de).
The hacker defaced several domains, including the homepage and the “forum,” “service,” “typo3” and “kundecenter” subdomains.
He also leaked the details of more than 20,000 forum and shop accounts. In some cases, besides usernames, passwords and email addresses, financial information has also been compromised.
The hack is very problematic because of the large amount of data leaked by the hacker, but some clarifications must be made regarding the owner of the site.
Many might tend to believe that avadas.de is a website owned by Avast because users are redirected to it from avast.de. However, Avast representatives have told Softpedia that this is not the case.
“We are aware that a site appearing to be an official site, AVADAS.DE, was hacked and compromised. However, this is not an official site and does not belong to Avast Software. Instead, it has been owned and operated for many years by Procello, a German reseller,” Avast representatives said via email.
“We have demanded, and we have been refused, the return of the [avast.de] domain name many times over the past years. We expect with this latest incident that the site will shortly be disabled and will never again be used by Procello.”
Currently, the original file leaked by the Turkish hacker has been removed from Speedy Share. However, it might have been downloaded many times before it was deleted and it may have been uploaded onto other websites.
That’s why it’s important for users who have made purchases via Avadas to keep a close eye on their bank accounts. If any suspicious transactions are identified, be sure to notify your financial institutions.
Also, Avadas customers are advised to change all their password since there’s a chance that cybercriminals, others than Turkish Ajan, might try to abuse the leaked information.