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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
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 19 2015, @08:25AM
The fact that one person was victimized is more than enough for this to become a big deal around here.
Gawd, you are dense. Yes, if this was a matter of some human right laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but this is only a matter of an idiot being told that they are an idiot, which while possibly rude, is no violation of rights and certainly not a big deal.
Wait, are you using "victims" in the "Indiana" sense? Or are you using "victim" in the Gamergate sense? Is it just the refusal of normal people to agree with your insane world view that is unjust and oppressive? Gentlepersons, I believe we have discovered the violence inherent in the system. I recommend a new mod, "Crazy, but that's OK", we will probably have to give it a +1, the whole "disagree" ruse is not going to work again. Or perhaps the Seinfeld version: "Not that there's anything wrong with that". This we might be able to get away with the +0 on. And finally, maybe just an "anti_gewg_" mod, at a suggested -2, just for emphasis. As a prior victim of a spam modding, it is difficult for me to suggest harsher measures for our serial disrupters, but it is even more clear now what must be done. (Hey, wasn't that the title of one of Lenin's pamphlets? Have we been infested by Trotksyists pretending to be Republicans? )