Avast Community Forums Hacked, 200,000 Accounts Stolen

We’re sure some of you guys have heard about the company Avast before. They make PC security and anti-virus tools for your computers, which is why we have to say that it’s a little ironic to see that the company’s community forums have been hacked over the weekend, with around 200,000 accounts being stolen in the process.

According to Avast’s CEO, Vince Steckler, on a blog post on Avast’s website, “This issue only affects our community-support forum. Less than 0.2% of our 200 million users were affected. No payment, license, or financial systems or other data was compromised.” He goes on to state that the forums were hosted on a third party software platform, which might explain why it might not have been as secure as Avast could have made it to be.

“We are now rebuilding the forum and moving it to a different software platform. When it returns, it will be faster and more secure. This forum for many years has been hosted on a third-party software platform and how the attacker breached the forum is not yet known. However, we do believe that the attack just occurred and we detected it essentially immediately.”

Steckler goes on to advise users to change their passwords on other websites, especially if they share similar usernames and password combinations used on Avast’s forums. No word on when the forums will be going back up, but hopefully when it does, it will be more secure than before.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: avast, Hacking, Security