Kodi Rebuilds Forums After 400,000 User Breach

Kodi, an open-source media player, has announced that it is rebuilding its user forum from scratch in the wake of a cyber attack that exposed the data of 400,000 of its forum users back in February.

The data of the users was advertised on underground forums including BreachForums, after the hacker managed to compromise the account of an inactive administrator. They then used this account to access the web-based MyBB portal, successfully making off with two database backups dated 16 February and 21 February.

"The nightly full backups that were downloaded expose all public forum posts, all team forum posts, all messages sent through the user-to-user messaging system, and user data including forum username, email address used for notifications, and an encrypted (hashed and salted) password generated by the MyBB (v1.8.27) software," Kodi said last week.

Although the passwords stored were reportedly hashed and salted, Kodi stated that users should consider the plaintext version of the passwords to be compromised. The team behind Kodi are actively working on performing a global password reset, in addition to building an entirely new forum server.

"We have chosen to redeploy the forum on the latest version of MyBB software. This requires us to extract and review all differences between the latest MyBB release and the fork we maintain, which includes numerous functional changes and backported security fixes," Kodi announced earlier this week.

Kodi has shared a list of compromised email addresses with HaveIBeenPwned to help ensure that all of its customers are aware of the breach, in addition to promising to send out email notifications to its forum users once the new server is up and running.

"The wiki is being moved to another server host. A review of the code files has been completed and it will be redeployed using the latest MediaWiki version. We recognise the wiki is the go-to Kodi info resource for many users and we aim to bring it online again as a priority. The paste server will also be moved and restored but this is less urgent," Kodi announced.