Forbes has confirmed that the hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army has breached their website’s publishing platform. In addition to accessing the WordPress admin console, the hackers, as we reported yesterday, also managed to gain access to some Twitter accounts. But today, after an announcement by Forbes on Facebook, it became known that the Syrian Electronic Army group also managed to gain access to the data of the popular journalism website’s readers.
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“Our users’ email addresses may have been compromised. Passwords were encrypted, but as a precautionary measure, we encourage Forbes readers and contributors to change their passwords on our system, and we also encourage them to change their passwords on other websites if they use the same password elsewhere,” Forbes said on Facebook.
“We have reported this to the authorities. We take this matter very seriously and apologize to our community members for this violation.”
Initially, the Syrian Electronic Army group tried to sell the email addresses and passwords they obtained from Forbes. However, an hour later, they announced that the data would be freely published on the Internet.
Two hours ago, hackers uploaded a file containing data from Forbes’ 1 million users. The data, as we reported, includes usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords. The data has been uploaded to what SEA says is a “secure server.”
This probably means it will be very difficult for Forbes to download them. The IP address of the server the data was uploaded to is 91.227.222.39. The server, located in the United Kingdom, has been used in the past by hackers when they defaced the homepage of marines.com.
