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OSNews Suffered 'Likely' Data Breach, Contemplated Going Offline Permanently (osnews.com)
hmckee writes: OSNews was offline for a few days for upgrades. It is now back up with a message that indicates they encountered a data breach and considered going offline for good due to maintenance and financial difficulties. "Our best guess is that someone was able to exploit a vulnerability in old, unmaintained code in the site's content management system, and made off with at least some user data, which may be as little as a few user records or, at worst, our entire database," writes Publisher David Adams. "Your email addresses were in there, and the encryption on the passwords wasn't up to modern standards (unsalted SHA1). [...] Other than potential spam, though, we're not aware of any other nefarious use of your data, we don't store much beyond email addresses and passwords..."
David goes on to cite poor advertising revenues and a lack of time for reasons to throw in the towel and go offline permanently.
David goes on to cite poor advertising revenues and a lack of time for reasons to throw in the towel and go offline permanently.
I've been reading OSNews for almost as long as I've been reading slashdot. It has always been more of a niche site, solely focused upon operating systems-related news, but within that niche it has had a better focus on relevant articles, better editing, and a higher quality of comments given the smaller and more dedicated userbase. I'd have to say, based upon the terrible comments so far on this story, that the quality of slashdot comments has seriously declined over the last few years. They are basically all worthless so far, and it's sad that clueless and disrespectful trolling is all that the slashdot community can come up with for the possible passing OSNews, a minor but worthy high quality competitor for many years.