At ITarian, we take security very seriously, and it is our highest priority. Very recently a new vulnerability in the vBulletin software, which is one of the most popular server applications for website comments including the ITarian Forums, was made public. On 9/25/2019 a patch for the vBulletin application was announced, and we scheduled our forums for an upgrade. Over the weekend, 4:57 am ET on 9/29/2019, we became aware that this security flaw in the vBulletin software had become exploited, resulting in a potential data breach.
Our IT infrastructure team immediately took steps to mitigate the exploit by taking the forums offline and applying the recommended patches.
Who has been affected and what data has been potentially accessed?
An unknown attacker exploited the recently discovered vBulletin vulnerability and potentially gained access to the forums database. User accounts contain information such as Username, name, e-mail address, last IP used to access the forums and if used potentially some IRC/Social Media usernames (at less than 1%). All user passwords in the database were stored encrypted. ITarian forums currently have around 45,300 registered users.
What should forum users do?
While account passwords were encrypted, we recommend that forums users should immediately change their passwords, as a precautionary measure. We encourage good password practices such as strong random passwords and not sharing your passwords across different Internet accounts.
We have the utmost regret for any inconvenience or distress this vulnerability may have caused you, our users. As members of our community of ITarian Forum users, we want to reassure you all that we have put in place measures to ensure that vulnerabilities in third-party software, such as vBulletin, will be patched immediately when patches become available.