The database of BitcoinTalk.org, a popular Bitcoin forum founded and moderated by the Reddit Bitcoin moderator Theymos, is being sold on the dark web.
In May 2015, BitcoinTalk announced that its server was compromised due to social engineering against ISP NFOrce, a type of confidence trick utilized to gather information, fraud, or a system breach. The database compromised from the 2015 security breach was stolen by the dark web vendor “DoubleFlag,” the same identity initiating the sale of the recently compromised database of Dropbox.
Specifics of the stolen database
The BitcoinTalk.org database being sold on the dark web has 514,408 accounts, with the email address, gender, date of birth, website URL, location, password, personal text number, and username of each account. DoubleFlag shared part of the database to HackRead.com, which contained all of the personal and sensitive information above.
Although the majority of the passcodes have been encrypted with the SHA-256 algorithm and SMF password encryption, there are methods of decrypting the cryptographic hash function with password cracking technologies like brute-force strategy. The vendor stated that decrypting the passcodes in the BitcoinTalk.org database is fairly simple.
Criticisms from the Bitcoin community towards Theymos
Immediately after the sale of the BitcoinTalk.org database was initiated, users began to heavily criticize Theymos for the development of a multi-million dollar forum software which Theymos planned to launch.
The software is called Epochtalk, which, according to Theymos, is still being actively developed. It has a response and intuitive user interface with speed optimization through to the use of technologies, including AngularJS and PostgreSQL.
Users harshly criticized the fact that Theymos and the rest of the development team received around US$50,000 in donations and are still delaying the completion of the project, which began in 2014.