Movie fan site Aintitcool.com said Thursday that it was hacked earlier this month, apparently in an attempt to drive up the SEO value of some disreputable businesses.
The site - which uses the URL AintItCool.com but calls itself "Ain't It Cool News" - said that it began experiencing server problems on Dec. 3, and with the help of a "white-hat" hacker found that the site had been targeted by individuals "trying to increase the search engine ranking ('black hat SEO') of less than legitimate businesses such as online pharmacies with reputations for shipping fake medicine," the site said in a statement.
The site said that it delayed informing users because of the fear that the vulnerability would be exploited by others, before a fix could be put into place. "Our community is exceedingly important to us," Aintitcool said. "In an effort to determine the way we were breached, it was important not to reveal that some servers had been compromised. If more of that wolfpack decended on us, it would have complicated the task."
The site initially encouraged users to change their passwords for the Aintitcool site's commenting systems, and to also change their passwords on other sites, if those users had used the same password. But the site then discovered a bug that prevented some from logging in if the Aintitcoolnews passwords were changed. The site now believes that no data was taken, it said.
However, the encrypted password file may be easily decrypted if the passwords are themselves weak, one of the site's administrators said in a comment.
The login bug, however, was a result of the site's decision to rapidly implement a "replacement software solution" that it had been developing independently of the hack, but was months away from deploying.
"Of course, pushing new software into service early does have consequences," the site said. "As you have likely noticed, we are still ironing out various improvements and bugfixes. We are also rebuilding and changing several other technical aspects behind the scenes. We have an entire team working day and night."
On the surface, the Aintitcool.com site hack mirrors the attack on Gawker, which compromised about 1.5 million usernames and their passwords. The hackers then used some of the shared passwords to fabricate spam on Twitter, prompting some sites like LinkedIn and Yahoo to reset their passwords and, later, for the FBI to launch an investigation.
Aintitcool.com, however, appeared to have been hacked to drive up the rankings of sites that peddled fake or otherwise low-quality medicine.
The site said a team was in place working out bugs, and that major bugs "should be increasingly less common". In two weeks, all of the comments should be imported into the new system.
The site also invited the hackers, believed to be Russian, to come forward. "If you come forward, you just might get an invitation to BNAT 13," its "Butt-Numb-a-Thon" film festival, the site said.
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