Another whoops. It appears that an older forum provider for Ars Technica was compromised. Email addresses were apparently harvested. Let the spam deluge begin continue.
The following is an e-mail sent to you by an administrator of “Ars Technica
OpenForum”. If this message is spam, contains abusive or other comments you
find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following
address:civis@arstechnica.com
Include this full e-mail (particularly the headers).
Message sent to you follows:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Hello,
You are receiving this message because you have a registered an Ars
Technica account with this email address.Our previous forum provider (Social Strata, formerly known as Groupee and
Infopop) had a server hacked recently, and has advised us that private
registration email addresses were harvested. These included email
addresses for anyone who registered with Ars Technica while we were still
using their services. In addition, the rooted server was used to send out
at least one mass phishing attempt.Although Groupee/Social Strata tells us that no password information of any
kind was accessible from that server, we still recommend that you change
your Ars Technica password (and any account on a third party site you use
that password with) just to be safe.We became aware of this issue this morning and are following up with
Groupee/Social Strata to see if we can get more details and assurances on
the scope of the compromise. We have also requested that they purge all
Ars Technica data from their systems so future problems don’t affect our
users.We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you would like
to read further updates on this issue, please see the active announcement
we have in our new forums:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1108748Please contact us with any questions.
Thanks,
Kurt Mackey
Technical Directory, Ars Technica
Not the end of the world but, annoying nonetheless.