Destructoid's User Records Compromised

Destructoid's User Records Compromised

January 19, 2009

Irreverent video game site Destructoid is cleaning up a bit of a mess this morning.

According to an e-mail we received from Destructoid editor Niero, a hacker cracked the site's user database over the weekend:

This is the letter every web site operator hopes he never has to write: it seems a glitch in our web site allowed someone to exploit the database this weekend. We have confirmed that the intruder succesfully obtained everyone's username and password.

As soon as we were alerted we shut down all servers, changed all passwords, took our forums offline, and notified everyone via email... We're doing everything we can do prevent this from ever happening again and deeply apologize for this incovenience.

On the bright side, we intentionally store very little personally identifiable information. However, you may still be at risk: If you frequently use the same password for other web services... we strongly urge you to update your password ASAP...


Destructoid has reported the incident to IC3 (FBI's internet crime complaint
arm)... We are also offering a $1,000 award to anyone with information that leads us to prosecuting the intruder...

Posted in

Comments

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by DarkTetsuya - January 19, 2009 at 12:02 pm -0500

... Yeah I saw the email. ><; (Luckily my cohorts have a site upgrade in the works, tho the worst I've had to worry about is rogue spambots on our forums :/)

300 Episodes and counting: http://www.orangeloungeradio.com/

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by Wraith108 - January 19, 2009 at 12:45 pm -0500

A similar thing happened to me some punks hacked a forum I use and then I found I  couldn't get into MSN anymore. Fortunately MS reacted quickly to my E-mail. It wasn't fun though.

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by insanejedi - January 19, 2009 at 12:53 pm -0500

luckly I don't use Destructoid. But the lucky ones live to feel guilty, so I feel bad for anyones accounts outside of Destructoid that may have been comprimised, especially ones linking to personal banking accounts and such.

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by Arcanagos - January 19, 2009 at 1:04 pm -0500

This is why you should ALWAYS be careful about your internet security... some useful tips (that hopefully should be obvious to most) if anyone's interested:

NEVER click a seemingly random link posted on a forum unless its to a site you know and trust... sometimes they might be legit, but sometimes the links contain hidden keyloggers designed to steal passwords and (in the worst cases) credit card numbers (these have been rampant on the WoW forums lately so I thought it'd be worth mentioning)

If you surf a lot... ALWAYS use Firefox with the Noscript addon... a lot of "driveby" spyware downloading is done through javascripts and noscript blocks those unless you whitelist the site (which only takes about 2 clicks)

NEVER, EVER use the same password for two different internet accounts... if one account gets compromised... you lose them all.

ALWAYS download antispyware and antivirus protection and run them regularly (i usually run mine about once every 1-2 weeks, but I dont surf or download much so it may be different for you)... some good free ones are AVG antivirus, Spybot: search and destroy, and Lavasoft Ad-Aware

Hope this helps, feel free to add on to this if i missed anything

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by hellfire7885 - January 19, 2009 at 2:20 pm -0500

I jsut downloaded Noscript, thanks.

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by Wraith108 - January 19, 2009 at 4:57 pm -0500

There's a addon for Firefox called passwordmaker that's good as it uses a master PW on your computer and makes a random one for each site you use it on. Also you can get a keystroke scrambler too.

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by Sigma 7 - January 19, 2009 at 2:20 pm -0500

Thankfully, my E-mail address password is different than Destructoid's.  However, given the quantity of passwords that I have to save for the many different sites, I'm kind of forced to use a set of three common passwords, especially since it's a bit difficult to automatically transfer saved passwords from one comptuer to another. 

I do have a password file, but even that's a bit fatiguing to search each time.  

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by MarcL - January 20, 2009 at 11:15 am -0500

I've gotta wonder why they would store passwords in a readable/decipherable form anyways...

Did they store them as plain text? encrypted?

I would hope they would hash the password, so that it can't be read, but only confirmed for login purposes.

Re: Destructoid's User Records Compromised
Submitted by kalpsiz1 - June 9, 2009 at 10:58 am -0500

thank you admin

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