NVIDIA Developer Zone, user forums plundered in hack attack
Yarr! These passwords be salty but the rest be plain
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Graphics processor biz NVIDIA has contacted users of its discussion forums and Developer Zone to warn that its servers have been hacked.
The message boards hosted at forums.nvidia.com and the programming resource developer.nvidia.com were breached last week. Data lifted from the compromised systems included account passwords although they were properly salted and stored as a one-way encrypted hash.
As soon as the chip designer became aware of the attack it shut them down, and started trying to work out what went wrong. NVIDIA is still trying to do that, but mailed users (including a brace of El Reg readers) to let them know their data has been compromised.
That information includes usernames and email addresses, along with the per-user "About Me" profile page details which are public-facing anyway.
The passwords were salted with random numbers so should remain secure against most brute-force attacks. Punters who have adopted the one-passphrase-for-everything approach are advised to run around changing all their logins anyway.
NVIDIA said that once the forums are purged of badness, it will send out new passwords to everyone, via their registered email addresses, and will post a public message on the status page when that's completed.
Any email that appears to have been sent by NVIDIA requesting "personal, financial or sensitive information" should be ignored, the company warned in an attempt to nip opportunistic phishing attempts in the bud. ®
COMMENTS
Its nice to see...
Its nice to see a technology company being sensible, and upfront about whats happening. I mean you'd expect them to be but so many won't these days.
Salted passwords? Check
Advised users clearly about what information was possibly accessed? Check
Advised users to change passwords "Just in case" Check.
Well done nVidia, while I might hate some of your practices concerning drivers at least you seem to be sensible with your users data.
Re: There is only one way to stop passwords being stolen from a web server
There is only one way to stop passwords being stolen from a web server
The only way to be certain something can't be stolen from a web server is to not have it stored on that web server.
It is well past time that passwords were stored on a physically separate box. The server sends it a user name / password pair, and after a fixed time interval (to stop analysis attacks) the box sends back a 1 or a 0.
It would also need to accept new accounts and amended passwords. It would need very strict control of those of course. That must be designed in from the start so that no possible input value can compromise it.
It is not expensive to do this. For small systems it could be implemented on elderly kit running a pre-packaged Linux app, and for sites that have much more traffic they presumably have enough money for better kit. Sod it, you could run a lot of sites using a Raspberry Pi!
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