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SoylentNews is people

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: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:39AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:39AM (#184963) Journal

    I think we may have a new meme on our hands...

    No, no we don't! Only positive and uplifting memes here on Soylent News what got an email account hacked. But seriously, Soylent News is People, after all, and people, and I am referring to "people" here, (do I get extra points for a Serenity quote?), make mistakes like picking weak passwords because it is only a test account and should deleted in the next update of the whole system. Or, not. People. I can live with it, I always have.

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