Data breach on car related forums/sites

[Troy]

I found a message in my Spam filter this morning but it sounded legit so I checked it out. There has been a data breach at a large company that specializes in automotive web sites. About 45 million accounts were affected and the data has been made available. The company has been sending emails but due to the massive amount it seems they've been getting caught as spam and/or blacklisted (how's that, you can't even warn people without being flagged as a bad guy).
http://www.zdnet.com/article/hacker-steals-45-million-accounts-from-hundreds-of-verticalscope-car-tech-sports-forums/

Since it's hard to know which sites belong to this company I found a list:
http://www.verticalscope.com/automotive/site-list.html

Turns out I'm a member on 7 of them! Most have implemented a mandatory password reset. More importantly, if you use the same user name and password for all the site you're on you need to change them all.

Troy

[charger_fan_4ever]

I got this one as well last week.

[DixieRestoParts]

Thanks for posting. I was on a couple.

[69bronzeT5]

Lovely. I'm on 4 of them.

[polywideblock]

none of the above    thanks for posting   

[Lennard]

This is the only car forum I'm on and it's not on the list so I'm safe.

[tan top]

none of the above    thanks for posting   

me too , good info ! thanks for posting 

[Drache]

It's not just car websites. I got the same email but it was for a motorcycle forum I was a member of.

[440]

None of those forums here 

It's refreshing to know this site is a tight ship. Not having ads makes things more secure I'm sure. Do we have bots that troll this forum?

Thanks Troy.

[Drache]

None of those forums here  

It's refreshing to know this site is a tight ship. Not having ads makes things more secure I'm sure. Do we have bots that troll this forum?

Thanks Troy.

Almost all public forums have some type of "bot". Google is one of the most notorious for bots.

Also ads aren't a big issue when it comes to things like this.

Breeches like this are caused by hacking either the forum software itself (vbulletin for example, which has been hacked a few times in the past) or hacking hosting companies for unknown reasons.

[garner7555]

It's not on the list, but the protouringmopar.com forum was acting strange a few weeks ago and now it doesn't exist anymore.        Not sure if it's connected to this or not.   Thanks for the info Troy.

[Troy]

None of those forums here 

It's refreshing to know this site is a tight ship. Not having ads makes things more secure I'm sure. Do we have bots that troll this forum?

Thanks Troy.

Definitely! Except "troll" is the wrong word for what we have. The easiest to identify are the ones that register new accounts. We get 6-15 of these per day. Sadly, most of these come from commercially available "SEO" software. Essentially it creates accounts on forums then posts links to whatever site they're trying to boost. Google and other search engines rank a site (partially) based on how many times it is referenced around the web. Some of them will post SPAM or porn. This is why I have to personally approve every new account. It's annoying and time consuming but necessary.

Then there are the "brute force" attacks. The forum is constantly bombarded with requests for invalid pages and/or ones that have known vulnerabilities. Then there are the attacks on the web server itself looking for unsecured scripts or test pages that have been left open. Lastly there are port scans and attacks on any open services. Most all of these can be caught/blocked rather quickly using scripts OR by identifying the origin of the attack and refusing connections from the entire network. This is why the site may not work when you're traveling to certain countries (Russia, Ukraine, China, Philippines, Korea, Moldova, etc.). If I had the money I'd pay for better firewalls so they wouldn't even get that far.

Troy

[JB400]

Thanks for the heads up.   Luckily, I wasn't on any of them.

[67Charger440]

Hobbyist car-guy forums are a waste of time for these guys...  None of us have any money left to steal! 

[ws23rt]

Thanks for the heads up.  I am on one of them but haven't signed in on it in months.

[odcics2]

I found a message in my Spam filter this morning but it sounded legit so I checked it out. There has been a data breach at a large company that specializes in automotive web sites. About 45 million accounts were affected and the data has been made available. The company has been sending emails but due to the massive amount it seems they've been getting caught as spam and/or blacklisted (how's that, you can't even warn people without being flagged as a bad guy).
http://www.zdnet.com/article/hacker-steals-45-million-accounts-from-hundreds-of-verticalscope-car-tech-sports-forums/

Since it's hard to know which sites belong to this company I found a list:
http://www.verticalscope.com/automotive/site-list.html

Turns out I'm a member on 7 of them! Most have implemented a mandatory password reset. More importantly, if you use the same user name and password for all the site you're on you need to change them all.

Troy

Thanks for the heads up. Looks like mostly the newer Mopars are involved..