For AMD, suffering an embarrassing hack to its corporate blog couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
Sometime late Sunday, cracker-upstart r00tbeersec’s ominous warnings of a targeted hack and database dump against a large company came true and AMD’s WordPress server was breached, blog defaced, and an SQL database was dumped with encrypted login details of AMD’s staff who blog.
AMD quickly took the blog offline, replacing its index with a post saying the site was undergoing “routine maintenance”.
r00tbeer, the apparent principal of r00tbeersec, tweeted after the deed was done: “#AMD – R.I.P http://blogs.amd.com , database will be released in few minutes. #r00tbeersec.”
The SQL database dump — which came to a whopping 32KB — included 189 email addresses split between AMD employees and PR staff from external organizations.
While this hack may seem to be serious, as if fits the pattern of other corporate forum or blog breaches, Sophos’ Paul Ducklin was quick to dismiss it as a minor affair — a “hackette”.
“All in all, a small deal in the history of security breaches,” Mr. Ducklin wrote in a post on Sophos’ Naked Security blog. “More of a hackette than a hack, and no AMD customers need to panic, which is good news. But every hack is, at its heart, bad news”
“If only we were collectively more conscientious about patching against criminals, and if only those criminals were more likely to be caught! Of course—since where hacking is concerned, an injury to one is an injury to all—the vast majority of Internet Good Guys amongst us can help make both those things come true. Patch early. Patch often. Keep logs. Report breaches.”
This isn’t the first high-profile hack in the technology world as not that long ago, as NVIDIA’s own forums were taken down.