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.

Comments

Hackers are after User Ids and passwords

[rsilvergun]

that they can use on other sites when folks reuse them.

Great shame

[rl117]

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.

What other sites can sustain a geek?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot, OSnews, and Hackaday are part of my daily routine.

I love OSNews. What more can I say.

Is there a site i should be adding to the mix? Arstechnica is great, but it doesn't have enough daily content until one of the others sites link to an article.

One way to improve osnews

[mikesum32]

IMHO, one way to improve osnews is to bring back Eugenia Loli- Queru.

I didn't always agree with her, but she was a damn-fine read.

Re: I remember that site

[peragrin]

Not reply Thom is a hypocrite. Never practices what he preaches. He would rail agsinist apple and iOS, or macos , and then mention how he loves his iPhone.

Got into an argument that 10 years ago with Thom and stopped reading. Came back every once in a while to see 10 day old reports of arstechinca articles. And 1-3 comments.

The bigger issue is it is Thom baby and he can't write, review or articulate.

Sad to see it go but it is time.