Heads up if you’re on Nvidia Forums – your Email address and other details might have been taken
Internet Security is a growing concern, with Nvidia being added to the ever growing list of targets that hackers are targeting, Nvidia have discovered their Developer Zone and Forums have been indeed, compromised.
Nvidia – the latest victim of a Hacking Attack
The GPU giant found out about the security breach after they themselves closed a few of their sub-sites in the course of the week so they could check out what they’d considered abnormal activity. It was then they found out the horrible truth, that both the Developers Zone and user forums had been broken into. They’re as yet unsure to the exact amount of account affected, but they’re estimating the figure to be around the 400K mark (so, a fairly substantial number to say the least).
What was taken on Nvidia’s forum breach?
The bad news for the users however is the details the attackers managed to grab is the fairly typical stuff forums store, this includes:
Username (fairly obviously!)
E-mail address (which can make you target for spam and other concerns I’ll get into)
Hashed Password with random salt value
Your public “about me” that’s stored in your profile.
So does that mean they’ve got your password? Not exactly – it means that they’ve got your hashed and salted password. BUT, remember, with faster computers now than ever before (we’re talking about GPU based computing here) the difficulty to break the hash is pretty much going to depend upon the strength of the original password (so hopefully no abc123 passwords!).
You should IMMEDIATELY change your password if you use it on say the NV forums and another website, just as Nvidia advises (and it’s fairly standard advice). You should also be on the lookout for phising attacks too.
I personally would recommend having a few email accounts, and possibly having one for the sole purpose of signing up to forums and the like, and another for important things such as online banking, ebay, that type of thing.
