Open source home theater software developer Kodi this week announced that it has started rebuilding its user forum following a February 2023 data breach.
The incident was disclosed last week, after a threat actor started advertising on underground forums a dump of Kodi’s user forum (MyBB) software. The hacker offered the data of 400,000 Kodi users, including on the now-defunct BreachForums cybercrime website.
The attackers compromised the account of an inactive administrator and accessed the web-based MyBB admin console on February 16 and 21, creating database backups and downloading existing nightly full backups.
“The nightly full backups that were downloaded expose all public forum posts, all team forum posts, all messages sent through the user-to-user messaging system, and user data including forum username, email address used for notifications, and an encrypted (hashed and salted) password generated by the MyBB (v1.8.27) software,” Kodi said last week.
All passwords, the software maker said, should be considered compromised, the same as user private data, including the information shared via the user-to-user messaging system. The admin team was working on performing a global password reset, Kodi said last week.
On Tuesday, Kodi announced that it was working on commissioning a new forum server, an operation that was initially planned before discovering the incident.
“We have chosen to redeploy the forum on the latest version of MyBB software. This requires us to extract and review all differences between the latest MyBB release and the fork we maintain, which includes numerous functional changes and backported security fixes,” Kodi announced this week.
To improve security, Kodi is hardening access to the MyBB admin console and revising admin roles and is also improving audit logging and backup.
To ensure that all users are aware of the data breach, Kodi is sharing the compromised email addresses with the Have I Been Pwned breach disclosure website and will send email notifications to all users once the new forum server is up and running. The forum had over 400,000 members.
“The wiki is being moved to another server host. A review of the code files has been completed and it will be redeployed using the latest MediaWiki version. We recognise the wiki is the go-to Kodi info resource for many users and we aim to bring it online again as a priority. The paste server will also be moved and restored but this is less urgent,” Kodi announced.
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