Hackers target Fur Affinity art gallery website delete everything — Thanks to the backup the site is up and running once again!
A well-known and widely followed online hub of furries community called Fur Affinity disappeared from the web. The furries community is a group of people having a keen interest in anthropomorphic animal characters like foxes and wolves. The hackers wiped off all sorts of content including art submissions and user profiles from Fur Affinity website, which actually is an online gallery that allows users to upload music, art, and written content.
It is quite possible that they also stole email addresses and hashed passwords. The website’s self-proclaimed Director of Operations, who uses the nickname Chase, stated in an announcement on the site’s discussion forum that “the attackers access to personal user data, such as encrypted passwords and email addresses.”
This announcement was made on Friday while by Saturday morning, a user having the profile name Fender clarified that the passwords have already been reset. Fender also revealed that the site has been facing issues since early on in May as researchers identified some technical flaws and vulnerabilities in the ImageMagick library. Attackers were able to exploit this weakness and run arbitrary code to hack the website by downloading the site’s source code prior to patching of the website by the admins.
If you are having trouble or are unable to use the Password Recovery Tool please email [email protected].
— Fur Affinity 🏳️⚧️ (@furaffinity) May 22, 2016
According to MotherBoard, after exactly a week, the site’s administrator, who uses the name Dragoneer, heard that users at an anonymous convention were selling the site’s source code on USB sticks and the same day their site was hacked again. In this next phase of attacks, the site’s content was deleted by the attackers. However, the site’s security team prevented key data like notes and journals from being deleted.
Dragoneer explained on the site’s forum last week that the team was busy investigating the selling of their website’s source code “somebody launched a second attack against the site using information gleaned from the source code.”
“At this time, we do not know who executed the attacks on this site. An analysis of the attack vector used suggests these individual(s) were experienced attackers and not casual bystanders,” states Fender.
Using a backup, the team was able to restore Fur Affinity on 11th may and therefore, the damage isn’t too much.
Here is a series of tweets from Fur Affinity official Twitter handle about the breach:
We have received thousands of emails requesting help with accounts and staff are actively responding. We will assist you as soon as we can.
— Fur Affinity 🏳️⚧️ (@furaffinity) May 23, 2016
We have received thousands of emails requesting help with accounts and staff are actively responding. We will assist you as soon as we can.
— Fur Affinity 🏳️⚧️ (@furaffinity) May 23, 2016
Even if you already reset your password /everyone/ will be forced to reset once site is out of read only mode.
— Fur Affinity 🏳️⚧️ (@furaffinity) May 21, 2016
If you changed your password since the site went live on the 18th that information is safe.
— Fur Affinity 🏳️⚧️ (@furaffinity) May 21, 2016
Furiarossa And Mimma/DeviantArt
