News has broken that Mumsnet has reset its users' passwords after a series of attacks, one of which involved armed police being called out to the London home of the parenting site's co-founder. Hacker gained access to the site’s administrative functions and hijacked some accounts. There have also been an attempt to force Mumsnet offline by swamping it with internet traffic, in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Mark James, Security Specialist at IT security firm ESET explains: “The internet is full of great things and sadly lots of bad. Account hacking and DDoS attacks can cause serious problems to websites when they are the targets. When sites get attacked in this way it’s important that the owners take action as soon as possible to protect the users’ details. Resetting passwords as a default option is a good start and then letting the users know what’s going on so they can take any extra precautions shows a good approach in protecting that valuable data. It’s important to run thorough checks on all the systems once compromised to ensure no long term malware has been injected for future use and then looking at how the incident took place in the first place, making sure systems are updated and patched to stop any potential future attacks succeeding.
Swatting is when someone calls the emergency service to respond to a critical incident that does not exist (firearms, drugs etc). It involves sending in the “swat” team to someone’s home or business usually during unsociable hours to cause as much inconvenience as possible. This can go hand in hand with harassment campaigns and is often very distressing for all concerned.”