{"id":698,"date":"2013-11-18T20:56:20","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T20:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=698"},"modified":"2025-03-28T22:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T05:00:07","slug":"an-eventful-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/an-eventful-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"An Eventful Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"
TL;DR:\u00a0Our Vanilla Forum installation\u00a0was hacked,\u00a0but our\u00a0VPN system\u00a0was\u00a0completely unaffected.\u00a0\u00a0Forum users should change\u00a0their\u00a0passwords\u00a0if they are used on other\u00a0sites.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Today, on November 18, 2013, on or about 5AM, we discovered a message posted across the top of our offsite forums propositioning visitors to send Bitcoin to an address to receive 10x the Bitcoins in return.\u00a0 Luckily, visitors of our forums are much more experienced than to fall for tactics like this.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
How did it happen?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Moving into detail, the exploit was publicly announced quite some time ago as can be seen here<\/a>.\u00a0 Our security team was aware of this issue, but the reported details of the vulnerability were incorrect.\u00a0 As such, our system remained vulnerable despite having been outside of the vulnerability\u2019s report.<\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n
Our Response<\/strong><\/div>\n
We immediately found and patched the issue and, further, we examined the actions of the intruder and determined\u00a0they\u00a0had accessed the forum server\u2019s SQL database.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Our strategy moving forward will be to make a number of changes to harden our frontlines in the ongoing battle to push our industry\u2019s security best practices to new frontiers.\u00a0 Specifically, we will be migrating to a more secure forum system.\u00a0 This new, more secure\u00a0forum\u00a0will continue to be isolated\u00a0from the rest of our systems\u00a0as it has always been.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Additionally, we would like to introduce our new Private Internet Access Whitehat Alert Security Program (PIA WASP)<\/a>.\u00a0 PIA WASP will be rewarding whitehat and blackhat researchers alike who follow our program\u2019s simple guidelines.\u00a0 We will reward, in name or anonymously, via any method, including Bitcoin for confirmed exploit discoveries based on their severity.\u00a0 Shell and SQL like access will be rewarded a minimum of $5,000 US if determined to be legitimate, unique and severe.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Finally, we have sent out an e-mail to all forum users to notify of this issue.\u00a0 Private Internet Access subscribers who did not use the forum are not affected in any way, shape, or form.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What Forum Users Should Not Be Worried About<\/strong><\/div>\n
Our VPN system is completely separate from our third party, offsite forum system.\u00a0 They are using entirely different passwords, different servers, different databases, different keys, different certificates, different software stacks, different datacenters, and, of course, there is no cross access between our forum server and VPN system.\u00a0 Absolutely nothing is shared.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
We intentionally setup this structure from the beginning to mitigate against these types of attacks since our forums and other third party systems are built and maintained by others.\u00a0 We were worried about the possibility of an attack vector which would have compromised the privacy of our users, so this was setup well in advance.\u00a0 The forum is simply reverse proxied in order to appear to be served from the same root domain.\u00a0 You can learn more about reverse proxies on Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What Forum Users Should Do<\/strong><\/div>\n
Vanilla Forums uses 256 iterations of a\u00a0salted MD5 to hash user passwords. While this is okay in practice, unfortunately, a highly determined adversary could potentially crack the password, still, if it is simple (such as a dictionary based password, etc.).\u00a0 It is highly advisable that you change your password on other websites if you used a common password between multiple sites, including the forum.\u00a0 Moving forward, it is additionally highly advisable to use a password manager that generates random, long, strong, and unique passwords for each website\/service such as Last Pass<\/a>\u00a0with 20+ char passwords.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
For Forum Users who are also Private Internet Access subscribers, please rest assured.\u00a0 Even if your VPN password matches your forum password and the adversary is able to somehow\u00a0crack\u00a0your password, this will not affect your VPN security\/privacy since the password is only used for authentication.\u00a0 The encryption is not based on the password at all, and more details can be found on our VPN encryption<\/a> page.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Ending Remarks<\/strong><\/div>\n
We\u00a0greatly\u00a0apologize for\u00a0this happening.\u00a0\u00a0Luckily this was an eventuality we had planned for,\u00a0and that\u2019s why our core VPN systems remain solid and unaffected.\u00a0 We will continue to\u00a0focus on and strengthen our\u00a0security practices.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TL;DR:\u00a0Our Vanilla Forum installation\u00a0was hacked,\u00a0but our\u00a0VPN system\u00a0was\u00a0completely unaffected.\u00a0\u00a0Forum users should change\u00a0their\u00a0passwords\u00a0if they are used on other\u00a0sites. Today, on November 18, 2013, on or about 5AM, we discovered a message posted across the top of our offsite forums propositioning visitors to send Bitcoin to an address to receive 10x the Bitcoins in return.\u00a0 Luckily, visitors of … Continue reading “An Eventful Morning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,12],"tags":[19,70],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","category-security","tag-bitcoin-2","tag-hack"],"yoast_head":"\nAn Eventful Morning<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"TL;DR:\u00a0Our Vanilla Forum installation\u00a0was hacked,\u00a0but our\u00a0VPN system\u00a0was\u00a0completely unaffected.\u00a0\u00a0Forum users should change\u00a0their\u00a0passwords\u00a0if they are\" 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