BITCOINTALK

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

BitcoinTalk is "one of the largest and, most importantly, international forums where you can find absolutely all the information about Bitcoins." "Bitcointalk.org is the largest and probably the most famous forum related to the Bitcoin world." "Here you can safely communicate with miners from different parts of the world, read about the most favorable offers from cranes or cloud mining sites, learn the principles of doubling and choose the most reliable services, communicate in "non-stop"mode."

"BitcoinTalk is a message board where people interested in the technical details and the development of Bitcoin software can talk to each other. The forum also has places for people who are interested in bitcoin mining, in trading with bitcoin, and in the economics of Bitcoin."

"Before the creation of the current BitcoinTalk Forum, Satoshi used a SourceForge forum, which is lost. When Sirius provided hosting, the forum was moved to bitcoin.org/smf. Satoshi made several custom modifications to the forum software and theme."

"In July, 2011 the forum was moved to bitcointalk.org in order to make it explicitly unofficial. The "forum" link on the bitcoin.org homepage was made to simply return the Google search results for the search terms "bitcoin forums". This was followed by Bitcoin Community members, very much in bitcoin's spirit of decentralisation, creating a number of alternative forums offering different moderatorial policies and using different software platforms. None of these alternative forums have yet reached the size of Bitcoin Talk." "On July 22, 2012, Bitcoin Talk reached its one millionth post."

"In May 2015, BitcoinTalk was the victim of a social engineering attack after an unknown hacker targeted an employee of NFOrce, BitcoinTalk’s ISP. In a revelation on Reddit at the time, forum operator and admin Theymos hinted that password hashes, private messages, emails and other user details could be compromised."

"Bitcointalk.org had 499,593 users hacked in May of 2015, and they do know about the breach. Bitcointalk.org data contains usernames, emails, passwords, birthdays, secret questions, hashed secret answers and some other internal data." "The stolen BitcoinTalk data includes usernames, email addresses, passwords, birthdates, secret questions, hashed secret answers and other pieces of data belonging to the platform."

"The attack is said to have targeted the site's ISP, a company called NFOrce that is based in the Netherlands." "Server compromised due to social engineering against ISP NFOrce. There will be extended downtime for forensic analysis and reinstall."

"The forum's ISP NFOrce managed to get tricked into giving an attacker access to the server. I think that the attacker had access for only about 12 minutes before I noticed it and had the server disconnected, so he probably wasn't able to get a complete dump of the database."

"The compromise was announced via the official BitcoinTalk Twitter account. Operator Theymos later took to the bitcoin subreddit to offer a more detailed explanation."

"Theymos said that BitcoinTalk could remain offline for as many as 60 hours following the incident, and cautioned users to "act as though your password hashes, PMs, emails, etc. were compromised"."

"However, the account information gained by the hackers may not have come of much use to them due to additional protection features incorporated into these platforms." "Only 44,869 (9%) of users on Bitcointalk.org used MD5 hashing with a unique salt for passwords. Of those, LeakedSource.com was able to crack 30,389 or 68%. The remaining 91% of user passwords were hashed with “sha256crypt” and LeakedSource estimates it would take them about a year to crack an estimated 60-70% of them. This method of password storage is far superior to nearly every website they say they’ve seen thus far."

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BitcoinTalk is one of the largest and oldest forums on the internet related to bitcoin. In May 2015, the server was compromised through a social engineering attack on the sites ISP (internet service provider). In the apparent 12 minutes that the attackers had access, they managed to pull the entire database of all 499,593 users. The stolen BitcoinTalk data includes usernames, email addresses, passwords, birthdates, secret questions, hashed secret answers and other pieces of data belonging to the platform. Luckily, passwords were securely hashed and the vast majority could not be efficiently brute forced.

https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-exchange-btc-e-bitcointalk-forum-breaches-details-revealed/ (Mar 4)
https://www.databreaches.net/bitcoin-exchange-btc-e-and-bitcointalk-forum-breaches/ (Mar 4)
Update on BTC-E and BitcoinTalk Hacking Incidents (Mar 4)
Bitcoin Talk. All about cryptocurrency - BitcoinWiki (Mar 7)
Introduction to BitcoinTalk.org | Bitcoin Weekly Show - YouTube (Mar 7)
Bitcointalk - CoinPoint - The Premium Digital Marketing Agency (Mar 7)
Reddit - Dive into anything (Mar 7)
Legendary profiles of bitcointalk. (Mar 7)
BitcoinTalk Server Compromised During Social Engineering Attack (Mar 8)
https://www.nforce.com/ (Mar 8)
@bitcointalk Twitter (Mar 8)
Reddit - Dive into anything (Mar 8)
LeakedSource disclosure of Bitcointalk.org and Btc-e.com Hack (Mar 8)

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