Geez, a guy takes a few days off (the great blogger’s sin) and all hell breaks loose. The crew over at Is-Hacked.com is claiming they hacked into Flippa’s admin panel late last week. According to the blog post at Is-Hacked.com, they were running some kind of “routine task” at Flippa when they discovered a vulnerability.
According to the post, this was not a malicious hack. They were not trying to hack into their system nor were they trying to do any harm. In fact, according to them they notified Flippa’s top dogs within hours of discovering the breech. Flippa responded quickly and had the “massive vulnerability” fixed immediately.
When I first read about this I didn’t think much of it. For starters, I’ve never heard of Is-Hacked before and only ran across this story via a Google Alert that has been sitting in my inbox. For all I know, this could be a bogus claim and much to do about nothing. Furthermore, there hasn’t been a word from Flippa about this, which would lead one to believe there isn’t anything to the claim.
Havid said that, Is-Hacked has a screenshot of Flippa’s admin panel published on their post. Unless the screenshot is a fake, you can clearly see they had full access to Flippa’s admin panel. They are promising to post a video as further evidence of the breach. The only reason they haven’t posted the video yet is because they are being threatened with legal action from Flippa, according to the post.
Is-Hacked is recommending any users of Flippa to change passwords for SitePoint, Flippa itself, PayPal, Escrow.com, Google Analytics, and any other account Flippa asks their users to associate with them. The reason for their recommendation is because they claim this was a “massive vulnerability” and getting access to Flippa’s private data was too easy. If they could figure it out, any hacker could – and most probably aren’t “friendly hackers” – so says Is-Hacked.
So was the hack real and if you believe it was, should you worry that your personal information may have been compromised? Good questions. These are the same questions I’ve been asking myself.
If there was a breech of any kind, you would think Flippa would alert users directly or at least post something on their blog. I didn’t get any message from Flippa and there hasn’t been anything on their blog about it so who knows what’s going on.
It may be a pain to change passwords for all these accounts but I suppose it’s better to be safe than sorry. I just wish Flippa would have said something either way. If any hack occurred, they owe it to their users to notify them of it. If it didn’t happen or if the breech was harmless, they should have said something to put this story to rest. Their total silence just makes things worse.
