14 DAY TRIAL // On Sunday, The Consumerist representatives notified their readers that the site outages experienced in the previous days were caused by a security breach.
They didn’t provide many details regarding the security issue, but as a precaution they turned off commenting on all articles and they plan to reset all user passwords.
“We first took the site down late Wednesday afternoon, when we were alerted to a security concern. The site was then cleaned and cleared by our security experts, and put back online within about two hours,” the Consumerist Security Team wrote.
“Last night, we detected a new problem and took the site down for another five hours in order to address that issue.”
In an update they posted later, they still failed to pinpoint the nature of the incident. However, they advised customers to reset all the passwords that were the same as the one used on Consumerist.
Also, they've recommended readers to scan their computers for malware “if they’re worried about a possible infection.”