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Now I don’t feel so bad that this site got compromised last week. I received an email yesterday regarding a security breach on the developer.nokia.com/community discussion forum. It looks like someone forgot to patch the forum which was exploited via an SQL injection attack.

From: Nokia Developer developer@nokia.com via peer360returns.net
Subject: Important information from the Nokia Developer website team

You may have seen reports or received an email from us regarding a recent security breach on our developer.nokia.com/community discussion forum.

During our ongoing investigation of the incident we have discovered that a database table containing developer forum members’ email addresses has been accessed, by exploiting a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL Injection attack. Initially we believed that only a small number of these forum member records had been accessed, but further investigation has identified that the number is significantly larger.

The database table records includes members’ email addresses and, for fewer than 7% who chose to include them in their public profile, either birth dates, homepage URL or usernames for AIM, ICQ, MSN, Skype or Yahoo. However, they do not contain sensitive information such as passwords or credit card details and so we do not believe the security of forum members’ accounts is at risk. Other Nokia accounts are not affected.

We are not aware of any misuse of the accessed data, but we have identified that your email address was in one of the records accessed, though it contained none of the optional information, so we believe that the only potential impact to you may be unsolicited email. Nokia apologizes for this incident.

Though the initial vulnerability was addressed immediately, we have now taken the developer community website offline as a precautionary measure, while we conduct further investigations and security assessments. We hope to get the site back online as soon as possible and will post developments there in the meantime.

If you have any questions on this, please contact Nokia.developer-discussions-support@nokia.com.

The Nokia Developer website team.

That’s the email I received and what appears on the page when you visit http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community. Luckily — at least as the email states — the only information gathered as a result of this attack was user email addresses. So expect some more spam in your inboxes.

Don’t let this give you a bad idea about real hackers. A real hacker would have exploited the system, reported it to the administrator and not have used the compromised information for personal gain.

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