Forbes Data Breach Impacts Over 1 Millions Accounts

[Jake <jake () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.datalossdb.org/incident_highlights/61-forbes-data-breach-impacts-over-1-millions-accounts

014-02-15 by lee_j

Today The Syrian Electronic army via their Twitter account
@Official_SEA16 announced that they have leaked the Forbes WordPress
user database not long after it was announced that they had managed to
hack their website.

Eduard Kovacs from Softpedia has stated that the leak has a been
uploaded to an IP address (91.227.222.39) which was also used last
year in a defacement on http://marines.com/ as well.

This breach is quite substantial and includes 1,056,986 unique emails
addresses and accounts with 844 of them being government (.GOV) and
14,572 educational accounts (.EDU). In addition, the dump contains
credentials from a Forbes wp_users database and contains 564
Forbes.com based emails including administrators accounts.

Forbes has posted a statement to their Facebook page regarding the
breach urging all users to reset their password on the Forbes network
and on any other sites they may have used the same credentials.

Security message: Forbes.com was targeted in a digital attack and our
publishing platform was compromised. Users' email addresses may have
been exposed. The passwords were encrypted, but as a precaution, we
strongly encourage Forbes readers and contributors to change their
passwords on our system, and encourage them to change them on other
websites if they use the same password elsewhere. We have notified law
enforcement. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to the
members of our community for this breach.

As Eduard points out that although the passwords are encrypted, the
email addresses are still very useful. In addition, it is not clear
the type of the encryption used and there is still a potential that
they can easily be decrypted. It is clear that this breach has the
potential to pose a significant risk for many of their users.

Breakout of just a few type of email domains:
844 .GOV
14,572 .EDU
91,464 hotmail.com
3,460 mac.com
185, 271 yahoo.com
407,787 gmail.com
25,050 aol.com
_______________________________________________
Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () datalossdb org)
Archived at http://seclists.org/dataloss/
Unsubscribe at http://lists.osvdb.org/mailman/listinfo/dataloss
For inquiries regarding use or licensing of data, e-mail
        sales () riskbasedsecurity com 

Supporters:

Risk Based Security (http://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/)
YourCISO is an affordable SaaS solution that provides a comprehensive information security program that ensures focus 
on the right security.  If you need security help or want to provide real risk reduction for your clients contact us!