14 DAY TRIAL // SourceForge.net is one of the most popular locations for software developers around the world, hosting millions of open-source projects. According to Wikipedia, SourceForge.net reached 155,585 projects and 1,658,777 registered users in August 2007. I think I made myself clear and made you understand that the website is pretty important for both developers and users. Because it is so popular, a major hack would be quite a disaster. And according to Valleywag, SourceForge.net was attacked yesterday, the website going offline in the morning for a limited period of time. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, since there were no reports about the outage, but the incident was resolved pretty fast.
"We played a game of cat and mouse with a "security enthusiast" from Europe yesterday. :) No harm done, though, and everything's running smoothly," Ross Turk, a SourceForge.net official, told Valleywag.
This is not the first attack over the website. Back in 2006, another hacker aimed to harm SourceForge.net, most users being advised to change their passwords in order to remain secure. "We urge all users who frequent this host to change their password immediately and check their project group space for any tampering. As a precaution, we have blocked access to all project resources by password until the user resets their password. After the password has been reset, project resources should be accessible within 5 minutes," an e-mail sent to the registered members at that time read.
In the recent few weeks, the number of the hack attacks has well been boosted after malicious people attempted to get control over a certain number of targets. Moreover, the security companies, which were supposed to defend our systems, have also been affected, as a potential successful attack could prove the world that nobody is secure on the web. So, next time you disable your security solution, think that your computer might be the next target.