Avast admits 400,000 accounts hit by forum hack

[Reefa]

Roughly 400,000 Avast users' account details have been compromised, following a cyber raid on the security firm's forums.

Avast Software CEO Vince Steckler revealed the breach in a blog post, confirming around 0.2 percent of the firm's 200 million users' details were compromised during the attack.

The attack occurred over the weekend and forced Avast to shut down its forum. It is currently unclear how the breach occurred, though Steckler said Avast believes the hackers leveraged a vulnerability in third party software being used to host the forum.

"This forum for many years has been hosted on a third-party software platform and how the attacker breached the forum is not yet known. However, we do believe that the attack just occurred and we detected it essentially immediately," read the post.

Steckler said no financial information was stolen during the raid and that key bits of the compromised information, including passwords, were encrypted.

"The Avast forum is currently offline and will remain so for a brief period. It was hacked over this past weekend and user nicknames, user names, email addresses and hashed (one-way encrypted) passwords were compromised," read the post.

Despite the encryption, Steckler recommended users change their login details as soon as possible.

"Even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords. If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately," read the post.

Steckler said Avast is migrating its forum to a more secure software platform to avoid further data breaches.

Avast is one of many firms to suffer data breaches in the past few months. Last week eBay confessed hackers had managed to steal customers' passwords, usernames, email addresses, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth during an attack in February while US retailer Target was hit last year.

Source

[shorty6100]

" Migrating its forum to a more secure software platform"- Sad that a SECURITY product wasn't secure enough in the first place.

[212eta]

If Security software vendors cannot protect :nono: their own yard,

then,

how are they supposed to protect users? :dunno:

[Arizin]

So Sad to hear this news. I'm a member at the forum that just got breached.

Hope the antivirus products remains secure!

[manju]

the forums seem to back up and running! :showoff:

[iih1]

Trend forums hacked...1st Panda, 2nd Avast,. the next??? be aware...change your password as secure as you can....

before Avast posted by F3dupsk1Nup, i have inform to Admins, Mods..here...BTW AVAST! when got hacked still using Old SMF PF

here good enough secure we are using IP Board... No issue as Admins here said...

Edited June 14, 2014 by iih1

[iih1]

So Sad to hear this news. I'm a member at the forum that just got breached.

Hope the antivirus products remains secure!

everything just fine just on AVAST..forums.!..but ironic..the Admins, Mods also members there seems no cares..

Edited June 14, 2014 by iih1