Users are advised to immediately change their passwords

Jul 24, 2013 14:16 GMT  ·  By

Representatives of Simple Machines, the provider of the open source community forum platform, reveal that their website has been hacked. The breach took place on July 20, but it was discovered only on July 22.

“The method is similar to the hacks that were recently conducted at other websites, even though those sites used other software. One of the admins account password was discovered, and from there further escalation wasn't too difficult considering admin privileges can do just about anything,” Simple Machines’ board of directors stated.

Apparently, the company is 100% certain that the website’s database has been stolen by the attackers.

Because of this, Simple Machines users are advised to change their simplemachines.org passwords. In addition, customers are urged to change their passphrases for all their online accounts if the same one has been utilized.

The stolen passwords are encrypted, but it’s uncertain at this point which algorithm has been used to encrypt them.

“The passwords are stored with encryption. Unfortunately, even encrypted passwords can be decrypted. Hence, the passwords used here should not be considered safe anymore,” Simple Machines noted.

In addition to passphrases, personal messages might have also been compromised.

The company clarifies the fact that the vulnerability leveraged by the cybercriminals is not in the SMF software, so users running the latest version of the platform should not be concerned as long as they change their password in case it’s the same as the one stolen by the hackers.

The attackers breached the website after obtaining an SMF admin’s credentials from another hacked site.

“Unfortunately for us, a Administrator used the same password elsewhere on another site and access to our site was obtained when the password from the other hacked site was successfully decrypted. As a result, the hacker was able to login here with admin rights,” Simple Machines explained.