Adobe’s Connectuser forum shuts down in light of databse hack
Adobe’s Connectuser.com has been temporarily shut down in the light of the fact that the user forum’s database was recently hacked. “ViruS_HimA” claimed this past Tuesday to have breached “one of Adobe’ and had made off with a copy of a database that contained email addresses, password hashes and other information of about 150,000 Adobe users.
The hacker, in order to substantiate his claim, released information pertaining to 644 users who’s email IDs ended in adobe.com, .mil and .gov, which is what caught Adobe’s eyes. “As soon as we became aware of the hacker’s post, we launched our investigation, which (based on the information leaked by the hacker) led us to determine that the hacker appears to have compromised the Connectusers.com forum site,” said Wiebke Lips, Adobe’s senior manager of corporate communications.
Adobe has pulled the site offline in the light of the breach and is now in the process of resetting passwords of all the users that have been affected. Adobe did, however, confirm that none of its services were effected, including the Web Conferencing platform itself. It is only the user forum that has been taken offline.
It seems that the intent behind the attack was to bring to light Adobe’s slow pace at patching security vulnerabilities. If that is the case, we do hope that the hacker wouldn’t release the contents of the database out of malice, as the password hashes were generated using an MD5 checksum, which can be easily decrypted. For now, we recommend that you patiently wait for Adobe to reset your password (if you’re one of the affected).