So we had to research an incident that involved some sort of hacking, whether that site was taken down, databases corrupted, and/or information was stolen. The first thing that came to mind when I read the assignment were the incidents involving Avid Gamers–2.0, specifically. I never fully understood what had happened, but the result ended in corrupted databases. All sites through AG2 were sent back to their last operational state, which was several months back. All recent data–users, forums and forum posts, polls, alterations to the site layout, articles, and so on–was lost, though they did try to regain lost information for the paying customers (whether or not they were successful I don’t know). I have no other information on this particular incident other than my own experience, unfortunately, and after a long while of smooth operation AG2 started going down frequently before altogether disappearing. Everything, gone. I never heard anything about what had happened, and during the frequent downtime the admin was no where to be found (in fact, he hadn’t logged on for almost a year–though moderators were still active). So I’m left with no research to do on the topic, as searching “Avid Gamers” yields no results.
In other news (and if that ^ story does not count), I did a quick search on this wonderful subject and found a very recent incident involving e-mail addresses that end in @hotmail.com, @msn.com, and @live.com. According to articles on Examiner, BBC News, and Neowin the login information for these e-mail accounts was stolen, likely through a phishing scam, and posted up on a public website. This included some 10,027 address beginning with letters A and B (most of which are from Europe). Since this recent news, Microsoft is still in process of investigating.
