Another day another gaming forum has been hacked — This time, a GTA fan forum has suffered a security breach; thanks to the outdated vBulletin forum software.
It looks like hackers have waged a war against gaming forums. In the last couple of weeks, several gaming giants have suffered some massive data breaches and in the latest, we have GtaGaming.com, a Grand Theft Auto Fan forum where GTA players gather together to share mods, tools, images, clips, news and views has suffered a massive data breach in which login and personal data of more than 200,000 registered users has been stolen and left on a hacking forum for sale.
The stolen data includes usernames, salted passwords, IP addresses and date of births etc. The forum has also acknowledged the breach and posted a notice for affected users revealing that the platform was using an outdated version of vBulletin forum software which is in the news these days for critical security flaws allowing attackers to make large-scale data breaches.
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Previously, EpicGames Forums and Dota2 forums also faced security breaches where hackers stole millions of login accounts, all because both forums were using the same old and outdated version of vBulletin software.
“We believe our forum database has recently been compromised, which has given hackers access to email addresses, hashed passwords, and any other details you may have saved in your profiles. We have now closed the forums permanently, and any accounts not updated within the next couple weeks will be deleted from the database. We will be moving the account database into a more secure authentication system, removing all trace of the vBulletin forum software, and until then will be keeping a close eye to prevent any further compromises, according to the notice.”
Full preview of the security notice is available below:
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MotherBoard also reported on the breach, according to which the hacking forum where hackers dumped the data for sale has been shut down meanwhile the forum’s administrator Shawn Harkin claimed that the total amount of leaked accounts should be less than 197,000.
“More than half are the result of spambot signups, either banned or having never progressed past email verification, while another significant number are inactive accounts created as early as 2003.” Of course, data for even one account being stolen is already one too many, it is at least fortunate in this scenario that the number of actual people affected would be significantly less than even 30,000—and of those, hopefully, none suffer any compromised accounts beyond GTAGaming,” Harkin told Motherboard.
Well, Harkin, it doesn’t matter if stolen accounts were 200,000 or 30,000, the fact is that it happened and it’s bad.
This is not the first time when Grand Theft Auto related platform came under target. Last year, Grand Theft Auto 5’s hub Rockstar Social Club was rumored to have been hacked however the news was denied by RockStar.
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If you are running a forum on vBulletin update it asap or you can be the next victim.
