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Racing Post p0wned, accounts accessed and passwords pinched

Hacker greets the judges with security down lame and headed for the knacker's yard

Popular horse racing news and gambling portal Racingpost.com has suffered a substantial security breach.

Reg readers have sent us the email they received from the site, which opens with the admission that “Despite our best efforts, the security on racingpost.com has been breached over the last 36 hours, in a sophisticated, sustained and aggressive attack. One of our databases was accessed and customer details were stolen.”

Things get worse, as follows:

“We have now established that a number of customer accounts were accessed. Although all the passwords are encrypted, we believe that there is still a chance that some passwords can be deciphered. As yours is one of the accounts involved, there is a risk of identity theft.”

The good news, if there is any, is that the site says “we do not store your credit card details on our website and these have not been the subject of any theft.”

But things are still bad enough that the site has “turned off the ability to register / log-on to racingpost.com.”

The letter goes on to suggest that members “take all precautions and reset your passwords on any other site which uses the same password as the one you use on racingpost.com as soon as you can.”

The letter offers the following mea culpa:

“Please be assured that we are currently reviewing all of our security measures and will put in place even stronger protection to stop this happening again. Extensive changes have already been made overnight with the assistance of industry-leading cyber-security experts.”

Different cyber-security experts, one hopes, than the ones who built the site's shieldware the first time around.

Site members will be notified by email when logons are once again possible and the site is sensibly advising those missives won't include a link, which should make things a little bit harder for Phishers. ®

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