Users should rush to change their passwords before they can be misused

Jul 21, 2012 09:18 GMT  ·  By

A hacker called SirLeakAlot has breached Cichlid Forum (cichlid-forum.com), a discussion board dedicated to cichlid, an interesting fish from the Cichlidae family.

According to the forum’s stats, there are 68,466 registered members, 67,686 of which have become the victims of this latest hack.

The data dump, split in three parts on peoplesliberationfront.net, consists of usernames, email addresses and MD5 password hashes.

The hacker didn’t reveal the reasons why the website was targeted, but a Twitter post provides some clues.

“Whether you are a well known organization or not, if your vulnerable you can expect your data to be leaked,” he wrote.

The main problem in such scenarios is not the fact that the affected users’ forum accounts can be breached. Instead, many of the internauts are most likely utilizing the same username - password combination on other websites as well, making their more important accounts susceptible to hacks.

Hopefully, the site’s administrators will act quickly to notify customers of the breach. In the meantime, we advise all cichlid-forum.com users to change all their passwords.