Destiny Quest

Forums

Topic: Be aware: account information may be compromised

• Stelio
  
  Community Member
  3 posts
  Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 10:47am

  I use a different e-mail address on each site where I register. This is useful as it means I can tell whether any messages purporting to come from a particular source are genuine or not.

  I recently received a spam message that was a phishing e-mail attempting to spoof PayPal, but the e-mail address it used was the one I have registered here (and nowhere else).

  So please be aware that the account information from the destiny-quest.com forums may have been hacked. I have changed my password accordingly.
• Da Boss
  
  Forum Moderator
  1013 posts
  Re: Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 1:44pm

  Hi Stelio,

  My webmaster has checked his logs and security processes, and nothing is amiss. You signed up for the site over a year ago, so is it possible that in the intervening year you used the same email address elsewhere? It's also entirely possible that the email address was harvested via some other more benign means.

  Either way, I can confirm that this site does not sell or publish user's details, nor has there been a security breach/hack.

  Rest assured, that if something was to happen to the site, I/the webmaster would contact users directly, apologising and informing them of the correct course of action.

  Cheers

  M
• Stelio
  
  Community Member
  3 posts
  Re: Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 2:01pm

  I completely trust you in terms of use of data, so I'm certainly not worried about that. But recently there have been many successful attacks on all sorts of sites, with the attackers gaining user information. I can probably point out half a dozen high profile cases in the past couple of months.

  In terms of whether this e-mail address has been used elsewhere, no. It starts "destinyquest@" which is a bit of a give away. ;-)
• Stelio
  
  Community Member
  3 posts
  Re: Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 2:09pm

  A few quick examples (links go to pages reporting the security breaches)...

  Feb 2012 - Microsoft Store India
  Feb 2012 - Foxconn
  Feb 2012 - Stratfor
  May 2012 - BoardGameGeek
  Jun 2012 - LinkedIn
  Jun 2012 - last.fm
  Jun 2012 - eHarmony
  Jun 2012 - Twitter

  Note that the BGG break-in in particular show the same features: users with e-mail addresses that they had never used elsewhere receiving spam. And note that it took BGG quite some time to find the breach in security. If you'd like, I can try to find out the nature of the breach at BGG as it may help you in uncovering any issue with your own security.
• Da Boss
  
  Forum Moderator
  1013 posts
  Re: Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 4:11pm

  I've passed this information on and spoken to my webmaster.

  I can only reiterate his previous assurances that there has been, to his knowledge, no breach to the site's server security but he will continue to check and monitor the situation.

  If users wish to change their password (if it is used for other accounts) they are, of course, free to do so.

  If anyone has any worries/concerns in future can you please contact me directly at: author@destiny-quest.com
• Battlelord
  
  Community Member
  1 posts
  Re: Be aware: account information may be compromised

  22 June 2012 at 5:07pm

  As a general rule, its best to get out of the habit of using the same password for multiple sites/logins. Its never easy remembering them all especially if you don't log in that often. Probably the most simplest way is to use a book and give a reference number to its page, paragraph, line and word position. Don't write down your password book your using, but making a note of the page number etc should not be a problem.

  Example, using The Legion of Shadow the reference p-211 L-3 W-7 should give you the password "village". Check it out. If you get used to a system you can just write down passwords as 211/3/7, who would ever know.

  Hope this helps