The online forum of free anti-virus vendor Avast has been hacked, resulting in the usernames, hashed passwords and email addresses of its members being compromised.
The company, who is renowned for its free anti-virus tools, confirmed the breach in a blog post yesterday, and has taken the forum offline while it investigates the circumstances that led to the breach occurring.
No payment or financial data was lifted during the breach, Avast has confirmed, and less than 0.2 per cent of the 200 million people who use its anti-virus tools are thought to be affected.
In the post, Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast, urges users that use the same login details to access other sites to change them immediately.
"If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords," the post states.
"Once our forum is back online, all users will be required to set new passwords as the compromised passwords will no longer work."
The vendor said it plans to use the forum's downtime to migrate it to a new location, as well as beef up its security and performance.
"We are now rebuilding the forum and moving it to a different software platform. When it returns, it will be faster and more secure," the post reads.
"The forum for many years has been hosted on a third-party software platform and how the attacker breached the forum is not yet known. However, we do believe the attack just occurred and we detected essentially immediately."
News of the Avast breach comes nearly a week after online auction giant eBay suffered a data breach that resulted in hundreds of millions of its users' passwords being compromised.
The company has since come under fire for not warning users early enough about the breach, after it revealed it first found out about it several weeks ago.
