Drupal website hack prompts password reset

Hackers have gained unauthorised access to the user names, email addresses and passwords of a number of Drupal.org users.

The open source online content management firm's security and infrastructure team confirmed the website breach in a blog post last night, and stressed that websites running on its platform should not be affected.

"The Drupal.org security team and infrastructure team has discovered unauthorised access to account information on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org," the blog post states.

"This access was accomplished via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself."

The platform itself is used to underpin blogs and enterprise applications, while the groups.drupal.org arm is where its users can congregate to work or receive support for their Drupal-based projects.

The blog post also confirmed that all Drupal.org account holders have had their passwords changed as a precautionary measure.

"Information exposed includes usernames, email addresses, country information, as well as hashed passwords. However, we are still investigating the incident and may learn about other times of information compromised, in which case we will notify you accordingly," the post continued.

The company said it has no information to share at the moment about the identity of the attackers, but assured users it was doing all it can to prevent something similar happening again.

For instance, the company has introduced a number of infrastructure and application changes that have seen it "harden" its Apache web server configurations and introduce an anti-virus scanner that looks for malicious files being uploaded to the Drupal.org servers.

Further to this, it has also advised users to be on their guard against phising attacks in the wake of the hack.

"Beware of emails that threaten to close your account if you do not take the immediate action' of providing personal information," the post added.

"We do not store credit card information, [so] as a precaution we recommend you closely monitor your financial accounts if you made a transaction on association.drugal.org or if you use a password with your financial institution that is similar to your [one for] Drupal.org."