What Really Happened to Ubuntu Forums


Nathan Osman's Gravatar

Nathan Osman
published July 22, 2013, 8:32 p.m.


Three days after what many would call a "nightmare for the Ubuntu community," details are finally beginning to surface about what exactly went wrong:

"We now know what happened, it wasn't anything to do with a security hole in VB, all this came about via social engineering and legacy problems left over from when the previous owner was still running the forum."
- cariboo907

He goes on further to state that "some of the loco mods had admin privileges" and that one of the accounts led to the compromise. It appears then that this was not caused by a vulnerability in vBulletin.

Interestingly, the person claiming responsibility for the attack had this to say:

"You can stop worrying about your passwords ... If I do get into a website, most of the time there's no REAL malicious intentions. Grab the database, leave a message. That's it."
- Sputn1k_

Yeah, right.