This article is more than 1 year old

NVIDIA Developer Zone, user forums plundered in hack attack

Yarr! These passwords be salty but the rest be plain

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. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like