Avast

Avast, an anti-virus forum, was hacked in May 2014 and approximately 423,000 member email addresses, passwords and usernames were stolen in the breach.

The forum’s Administrators are based out of Prague and is run by an anti-virus firm that is well known around the world for their free security software products and boasts on its website that it protects over 200MM computers, more than any other anti-virus software out there.

At the time of the breach, the website’s forum would simply not resolve.

On May 26, 2014, Avast’s CEO, Vince Steckler, addressed the hack for the company’s customers, which in part said:

The AVAST forum is currently offline and will remain so for a brief period. It was hacked over this past weekend and user nicknames, user names, email addresses and hashed (one-way encrypted) passwords were compromised. Even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords. If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately. Once our forum is back online, all users will be required to set new passwords as the compromised passwords will no longer work.

This was the second time that Avast was hacked in recent year. The year prior to this attack, the company acknowledged that hackers attempted to gain access to the company’s DNS records so that it could redirect users to a different website; however, Avast was able to expel the threat before any damage occurred.