If you've ever made an account on the popular GTA-centric fan website GTAgaming and used the same password anywhere else, now would be a good time to change said passwords. While usually hacks like this dent the prestige of the victim site at worst, this attack might have sealed the fate of not only GTAgaming but of their sister site, GTA4-Mods.com.
What makes this exceptionally sad is that we are talking about one of the oldest GTA fansite in existence. GTAgaming has been going strong ever since 2003, while their sister site went online in 2008. The main site contains some of the most extensive databases for walkthroughs, tools, tweaks, unofficial patches and mods for the older games, while the modding site is the largest one supporting downloads for the first of the HD universe releases.
However, due to staffing issues, both sites have been degrading, with the community desperately trying to hold things together. It's not that the sites aren't popular, but somehow the people running them simply don't have the time or resources to properly maintain such massive amounts of data, especially considering that they have community forums going.
We believe our forum database has recently been compromised, which has given hackers access to email addresses, hashed passwords, and any other details you may have saved in your profiles. Upon logging into the site you will find you are forced to change your password, and shortly we will be force resetting all passwords not updated. We also recommend changing your password on any site(s) that may have used the same one.
Well, damn. The unfortunate hack happened due to the vulnerabilities in the vBulletin software used to power the forums. Though vBulletin used to be among the most common forum structures, many weaknesses that can be easily exploited by hackers have recently come to light. The hack of the GTAgaming forums has lead to the theft and sale of personal account data stolen from over 200,000 users.
Such hacks happen because many people still use the same passwords for multiple online services, meaning that if a hacker cracks one account, they'll have access to more. Information taken from personal accounts like names, birthdates and addresses are also used in identity theft. Usually when a forum is hacked, the data is then sold or posted to hacking forums where other malicious coders may used it to their benefit.
