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Digital
Hack news: Topspin forums, Winehouse and Bieber fans
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 5 July 2011
Topspin is the latest company to suffer from one of those increasingly fashionable computer hacks, though it wasn’t the D2F firm directly that hackers were targeting. Topspin used the vBulletin platform to host its forums, but saw those boards go down as the vBulletin servers were attacked. After trying some quick fixes, Team Topspin decided to move their forums to an alternative system. Content from the old forums will be transferred over, though community members will have to re-register.
The company’s Brad Barrish wrote in a blog post on the Topspin website: “As some of you know, we ran into problems with our community forums over the last few weeks. Our community forum, which was hosted on vBulletin, initially got hacked so we patched the software, re-launched and down they went a few days later. We had plans in place to migrate the community to a new home, so instead of continuing to play the cat and mouse game, we made the decision to centralise the community on Zendesk, which is the incredible app we use to support our customers and fans”.
The attack on the Topspin forums didn’t affect any of the D2F firm’s other digital services. Elsewhere in hacking news, word has it sheets of personal data about Amy Winehouse and Justin Bieber fans have been published onto the internet. It seems the data probably came from websites that have run promotions around both artists, rather than their official sites, though the exact origins of the fan information is not clear.
