{"id":58225,"date":"2013-09-10T11:10:09","date_gmt":"2013-09-10T09:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=58225"},"modified":"2013-09-10T11:23:36","modified_gmt":"2013-09-10T09:23:36","slug":"sa-forums-victim-of-vbulletin-exploit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/58225-sa-forums-victim-of-vbulletin-exploit","title":{"rendered":"SA forums victim of vBulletin exploit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Popular South African forums NAG.co.za, Carbonite.co.za, and MyBroadband.co.za recently fell victim of hacking attempts that used an exploit in vBulletin 4.1+ and vBulletin 5+.<\/p>\n

On 27 August 2013, vBulletin Technical Support Lead, Wayne Luke posted about the exploit on the vBulletin support forums<\/a>. vBulletin only began to inform its forum software users of the exploit via e-mail from 3 September 2013.<\/p>\n

This created a situation in which hackers were made aware of the vulnerability, but many VBulletin forum managers were left in the dark.<\/p>\n

This caused a spate of hacks on forums using the VBulletin software, including many high profile South African forums.<\/p>\n

MyBroadband<\/h3>\n

On 28 August, MyBroadband picked up an admin intrusion on its forum exploiting the vBulletin vulnerability. \u00a0The problem was luckily contained before any significant damage was done, and no downtime was experienced.<\/p>\n

The exploit has been resolved on MyBroadband and additional security put in place.<\/p>\n

Carbonite<\/h3>\n

The Carbonite forum briefly displayed a hacked landing page<\/a> with a political message around the Syrian civil war. The site has since been restored.<\/p>\n

Henk Keuris, co-founder of Carbonite, explained that the hack occurred around 7PM on 9 September 2013. “However, we did notice the server going down at around 10 pm, for a number of nights in a row, starting mid last week,” said Keuris.<\/p>\n

Keuris said the hack was done through a vBulletin installation on a Linux server with Apache.<\/p>\n

Keuris explained what he did to bring Carbonite back online: “At this stage, all I did was remove the index.html file, which restored the website to working order. I also changed the admin root password and did a system wide software upgrade (not OS, only apps).”<\/p>\n

As for how the hackers got into Carbonite, Keuris said “We do not yet know. We are currently investigating and will know later this week.”<\/p>\n

NAG forum<\/h3>\n

The NAG.co.za forum was also victim of a hack attack with a political motive. The forum website now redirects to a site with a pro-Assad Syrian government message.<\/p>\n

NAG assistant editor, Geoff Burrows explained that the hack occurred 9 September, around 4-5PM. “We have a security professional working on it right now,” said Burrows.<\/p>\n

The NAG forum was installed on a dedicated server running Linux.<\/p>\n

Burrows said that the hackers gained entry into the system through the known vBulletin exploit, which has now been removed.<\/p>\n

\"NAG<\/a><\/p>\n

More gaming news<\/h3>\n

Deep Down: amazing PS4 game first gameplay, details<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

PS Vita TV home console, content stream<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

New PS Vita revealed<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Offline play coming to Diablo 3 on PC?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hackers have cracked into popular South African forums using a vBulletin exploit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":58227,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6894,21,2144,2752,5793],"class_list":["post-58225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-carbonite","tag-headline","tag-nag","tag-sa-gaming-market","tag-sa-gaming-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58225"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58232,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225\/revisions\/58232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}