Recent Brivium Hacking Case & How You Can Prevent It
Online Security is becoming more and more of an issue today. Hackers and crackers seem to be more and more common. If you're following the admin community as closely as I do, you've probably been aware of the recent issue involving Brivium and their recent hack of The Admin Zone. If you aren't already aware of this,4607 here's the official XenForo announcement . Now, this can be a very scary situation whenever something like this happens. I'll break down what happened, and how you can try to prevent it from happening to you on your forums, as well as on Forum Promotion.
What Happened?
Again, the link to XenForo's official statement is here . The owner of Brivium, a XenForo plugin company, decided to hack an account of a The Admin Zone moderator to delete some negative comments about Brivium on the The Admin Zone's forum.
How Did He Hack the Account?
Now, you're probably wondering how exactly the owner of Brivium hacked a TAZ moderator's account? It's quite a simple process, actually. The TAZ moderator had a similar (although not identical) password on Brivium as he did on The Admin Zone. By going through the Brivium database and discovering the TAZ moderator's password on Brivium, he was able to guess the password on TAZ, solely based upon the similar password the TAZ moderator had on Brivium.
How Can You Prevent This?
Forum Promotion has a very good set of on security tips called Staying Safe Online . Those tips are some very good tips that can help anyone stay safe online. However, there are some other online safety tips that can help you prevent another situation like this happen again.
On Forum Promotion
Always have a password completely unique to Forum Promotion, and change it regularly to make sure that you're always keeping a fresh online security presence. Always have a login name different from your current user name. Whenever you sign up on Forum Promotion, your login name is immediately set to whatever you chose your screenname as. It's highly recommended that you always change your login name to something unique to FP immediately after you register. Your login name is like a second password to help prevent hackers from accessing your account.
On Your Forum and Other Places Online
I can't stress this enough: always has passwords that are completely unique to the site that you're registering on and passwords that you aren't using on any other places online. This entire situation could've been prevented if the moderator would've used completely unique passwords for each of the different sites. Using different screen names is also something that can help, because, even if someone has found out your password for another site, if you're using different screen names, they'll never know who you are!
Conclusion
The takeaway from this article is now to have a safer presence online, as well as what happened in the Brivium/TAZ hack. Thank you all for reading, I hope you've learned something about the basics of online security.
