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posted by NCommander on Monday May 18 2015, @10:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the standing-by-our-principles dept.

Normally, when I make a post on SoylentNews, it's to talk about some exciting new feature, our future, or something similar.

Unfortunately though, on rare occasions, I have to make announcements like this one. Sometime between May 12-13th, one of our email accounts was breached. The account ("test1") was left over from go live, over a year and half ago, and had a very weak password protecting it. We believe that an automated password guesser was able to find and access the account. Once breached, the account was used to send a significant amount of spam until we deleted the affected account on the 14th May 2015.

As a result of the compromise, several spam services have blacklisted our mail server; we're currently working to try and get ourselves cleared whenever we become aware of one of these blocks. We do not believe any user information or sensitive data was compromised; the account in question was simply a virtual dovecot account with no corresponding UNIX account attached to it.

mechanicjay was primarily responsible for handling this and cleaning up the mess, and I wish to personally thank him and the rest of the sysops team for their handling of this issue. We are looking at taking steps to prevent a reoccurence such as using fail2ban and the like. Unfortunately, most IDS systems like fail2ban are incompatible with IPv6 which we use extensively internally within our network.

A sysops meeting is being scheduled to discuss this and other changes we're making to the infrastructure.

I will update this article (or post a new one) with additional information should it become available,
NCommander

 
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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @12:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @12:38PM (#184481)

    It can't be any worse than gewg_'s "USAian Researchers Impressed With Cuba's Drugs" submission, which not only is full of his usual pro-communist bullshit, but it also contains a slur ("USAian") within its title.

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:56AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:56AM (#184966) Journal

    And pull all these tiresome and redundant complaints to the "admins" to censor stuff! Are these ACs so clueless as to not realize that Soylent News is people, and that means there are no "admins"? So all this "unfair" "incorrect', and my favorite, "abusive" moderation needs to continue unabated! But one question, where has the Mighty Buzz been of late? Has he submerged? That would explain a lot. Ever since the Jade Helm accusation that it was Okies that would be invading Tejas . . . .