Malicious people break into forum software servers phpBB

The servers of the popular forum software phpBB were hacked last weekend. This was announced by the software development team. It is not yet clear what exactly the attackers stole.

That writes the phpBB team on its website. “We immediately took our network offline for investigation while the attack was still ongoing,” it said. It is currently unknown who is behind the attack and what the motive is.

The team advises anyone who has registered on the phpBB site to take action. For example, if you use the password on www.phpbb.com or area51.phpbb.com on other sites, it would be a good idea to change it there. The cause of the hack is unknown, but according to the development team, it emphatically did not affect the forum software itself, meaning installations on other servers are not vulnerable.

The phpBB team says it will provide more information in the near future. “We will build our systems from scratch and verify the integrity of all data before putting it online. This process is likely to take several days.”

PhpBB is popular forum software used by communities worldwide. For a long time, the software suffered from a bad image in terms of security. This was partly due to malware, which defaced countless websites with the software. Today, the software is said to be more secure, the developers claim. The latest version, 3.1.2, dates from last month.