(bykst, Pixabay)
14 September 2016. EurekAlert, an online scientific news distribution service, was taken down last night after discovering a security breach that occurred on Friday, 9 September. An investigation by American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, that publishes EurekAlert, shows “registrants’ user names and passwords were compromised.”
A letter posted by Ginger Pinholster, Chief Communications Officer at AAAS, says the organization learned of the breach on Sunday, 11 September. Her letter notes …
An investigation revealed that our web site had experienced an aggressive attack on September 9 that compromised usernames and passwords. As we were working to implement a secure password-reset protocol for all registrants, the unknown hacker publicly released an embargoed EurekAlert! news release. We then decided to bring the site down immediately, to protect other embargoed content.
Pinholster adds that financial information from subscribing institutions is not kept on the EurekAlert site, and was not affected by the breach.
The letter said AAAS “will bring the site back online as soon as we can ensure that vulnerabilities have been eliminated,” but gave no indication of how long that would take.
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