Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

ESET Forum Breached, User Credentials Compromised

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.

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.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

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.

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing 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.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.