Great Era of Insecurity

[Azareal]

I remember 2007 - 2009 where it was the absolute wild west without anyone caring the slightest bit about security, except maybe MyBB. Huge mountains of security vulnerabilities in phpBB, IPB and vB lol

Sites were just hacked left and right without a care in the world and with one phpBB forum, it got sabotaged by one of the competitors who redirected all the forums to their site and put up big notices to go use them instead.

I had moderators just casually finding security vulnerabilities in vB3 without even trying with tiny bits of knowledge they got from looking at random things on Google. But, it was nowhere near as bad as phpBB, phpBB was just a train-wreck, I can't count how many hacked sites there were.

It was even worse with the large companies as you would just hear about large sites like MySpace, banks, Sony, etc. getting hacked with SQL Injection and XSS vulnerabilities all the time. It's even said that Twitter got compromised due to an administrator using a dictionary word as their password, although that was a bit later.

Do you have any tales? lol

 

[Deleted member 1609]

This is slightly before your time frame, but I remember the extreme vulnerabilities in phpBB around the 2.0.11/2.0.12 era that led to a TON of forums getting hacked. I think it was in 2005. Any phpBB forum that hadn't been upgraded to 2.0.13 was basically free real estate. phpBB 2.0.11 had a vulnerability where you could take out the entire server that was running the forum somehow (I don't remember the specifics), and any version before 2.0.13 had a vulnerability where you could easily get administrator access.

 

[Jason76]

I don't think hacking was ever a problem except for lazy admins. People who won't update their software or use decent/great passwords. So any hacking done was probably deserved.

I mean, someone with a password like "123" getting hacked? Come on!