The ESET Security Forum has been hacked and the company has confirmed that account credentials of its roughly 2,700 members have been accessed by the attackers.
According to an announcement posted on the forum, the attackers have gained access to usernames (email addresses) and hashed passwords. Financial or other sensitive information has not been compromised, and ESET software users and the company’s infrastructure are not impacted.
ESET’s forum is hosted by a third-party provider, which discovered the breach. The security company said that it has also launched a full-scale investigation into the incident. Impacted customers are being notified and advised to change their passwords, not only for the forum, but also for other services where the same password has been used.
ESET has told SecurityWeek that the website is powered by Invision Power Board (IP.Board) from Invision Power Services (IPS). The passwords are protected by a one-way hash function provided by IPS for the forum software.
“We had unconfirmed indication about suspicious activity on our forum at the end of the previous week. Immediately we posted recommendation to users to change passwords without detailing the incident (because we did not have any details at that time, just indication) – this statement was as precaution at that time,” the company explained.
The investigation conducted in collaboration with the forum provider confirmed that the login data has been compromised, ESET representatives said. The company has revealed that it’s still trying to determine the source of the data breach.
On Wednesday, HackRead reported that an Indonesian hacker, who has reportedly defaced a total of 275,000 websites, breached ESET’s main Spanish domain (eset.es) and several of its subdomains. However, this incident is unrelated, ESET told SecurityWeek.
“The report mentions sites that are not operated by ESET but we investigated and checked with our distributor, in short: no security was really compromised. They detected activity of someone entering their site. And even as the perpetrator was active for few moments, the whole thing was over in few minutes. The whole breach was under full control of their experts,” ESET said in an emailed statement.
ESET is not the only security company’s whose forum has been targeted recently. At the end of May, Avast Software was forced to shut down its third party-hosted community-support forum after a data breach that affected around 400,000 users.
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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