XKCD forum data breach impacted 562,000 subscribers

September 3, 2019  By Pierluigi Paganini


The popular webcomic platform XKCD has suffered a data breach that exposed data of its forum users, the incident impacted 562,000 subscribers.

XKCD is one of the most popular webcomic platform created by the American author Randall Munroe in 2005, it is a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. XKCD has suffered a data breach that exposed data of its forum users. The data breach impacted 562,000 subscribers, the forum has been taken offline after the incident.

“The xkcd forums are currently offline. We’ve been alerted that portions of the PHPBB user table from our forums showed up in a leaked data collection.” read a message published on the XKCS forum “The data includes usernames, email addresses, salted, hashed passwords, and in some cases an IP address from the time of registration,”

The data breach took place on July 1st, 2019, the popular security researcher Troy Hunt, who received the data by security researcher Adam Davies, alerted the company of the incident.

58% of the leaked addresses were already in the HIBP archive because they are from previous data breaches.

Hunt added the data to the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) website over the weekend. Exposed data include usernames, email and IP addresses, and passwords stored in MD5 phpBB3 format.

“We’ve taken the forums offline until we can go over them and make sure they’re secure. If you’re an echochamber.me/xkcd forums user, you should immediately change your password for any other accounts on which you used the same or a similar password,” continues the message.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – XKCD, data breach)



Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.





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