Renoise.com back online after being attacked

On Friday the 8th of January 2010, Renoise.com was targeted by hackers.

To prevent any further harm, we immediately shut down the server. We then carefully analyzed what exactly had happened since the attack. This is why the website was down for so long.

Most of the services (wiki, blogs, tutorials) on renoise.com are still offline. They will be brought back online, one by one. We are taking this opportunity to evaluate and fortify every nook and cranny of the website. We are temporarily replacing the website with a static HTML-only version as we work on the server in the background. We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope to to reanimate the renoise community portal as quickly and safely as possible.

We've already closed the vulnerability which made the attack possible. We will do everything humanly possible to avoid such incidents in the future.

What has happened:

After extensive detective work, it looks like an automated attack focused on harvesting email addresses. We have to assume that the attack did not specifically target Renoise as a product, but rather that its intent was to acquire a list of validated email addresses every community site is bound to have.

Renoise Backstage, a separate section of the site where we handle the Renoise User Accounts, did NOT get hacked. Therefore, the registered Renoise user accounts are safe. However, some accounts from before 2005 were stored in an obsolete database and were not fully migrated to Renoise Backstage. Those accounts were exposed, but have now been secured and closed. We will be contacting the affected users via email and will work with them to restore those accounts.

We do not store credit card numbers. The payment process is handled by our shop partner (SWReg). Even if the attackers would have been looking for that kind of data, they wouldn't have found any traces of such data on our servers.

The forum database was the target of the attack. Please note that this does NOT mean that anyone has access to your emails or forum account. We are a victim of a typical website hack, the biggest point of interest was to harvest email addresses for spammers and their botnet. For good measure, you should reset your forum passwords immediately.

Again we are very sorry for the inconvenience and the down time. Fortunately we reacted quickly enough to avoid a much worse scenario.

If you have any questions, apprehensions, or other thoughts about what has happened, then please let's discuss it publicly in the forum or contact us privately.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

The Renoise Team