A group of hackers going with the handle of “The Hole Seekers” have hacked and defaced a famous Bitcoin discussion forum on Wednesday.

Forum administrators were quick to restore the website before it was taking offline but it seems as if the damage has already been done as the group is selling 150,000 user emails and hashed passwords online.

Theymos who is BitcoinTalk.org’s administrator said in a note on reddit:

”It’s unfortunately worse than I thought. There’s a good chance that the attacker(s) could have executed arbitrary PHP code and therefore could have accessed the database, but I’m not sure yet how difficult this would be. I’m sending out a mass mailing to all Forum users about this.”

Hackers have uploaded a Youtube video, showing the defacement as it was done:

SoftPedia reports that it was contacted by the hackers with a claim that they are selling 150,000 emails and hashed passwords stolen from Bitcointalk.org in BTC 25. As a proof, the hacker sent SoftPedia a file with 5,000 email addresses and passwords.

The data seems to be legit and if it really is then the users are in big problem as the data can be cracked, used in scams and phishing attacks. We are waiting for an update from the forum’s administrator and will keep you updated.

At the time of publishing this article, the forum was down and showing offline message.

Update: BitcoinTalk.org’s administrator Theymos has verified the data and confirmed that it is fake. The leaked data never existed in site’s database. However, the defacement is legit.



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