TechRadar closes forums following data breach

Updated happygeek 0 473 Views

Following on from the news earlier this month that LinkedIn had suffered a major security breach involving the compromise of at least six million user passwords, and then dating site eHarmony apparently falling victim to the same password hacking compromise, the latest to be hit would appear to be the UK-based consumer technology news and magazine site TechRadar.

dweb-techradar Late last night the site, owned by magazine giants Future Publishing and which gets in excess of seven million visitors from around the world each month, made the announcement on Twitter and the website forums were closed while an investigation into the breach is underway. According to an official statement from Nick Merritt "user details including username, email address, date-of-birth and encrypted passwords have been stolen" due to the compromise of the user registration database for the site.

Emails have been sent out to all registered members of TechRadar, and to those who were registered as members of the various Future Publishing magazine forums which came under the TechRadar banner when they were merged to form the site, warning of the breach and advising that they change their passwords at other sites if they used the same one.

Here is what that email, signed by TechRadar Publisher Nick Merritt, had to say on the matter:

Following on from the news earlier this month that LinkedIn had suffered a major security breach involving the compromise of at least six million user passwords, and then dating site eHarmony apparently falling victim to the same password hacking compromise, the latest to be hit would appear to be the UK-based consumer technology news and magazine site TechRadar.

Our IT team launched an investigation immediately and has identified the cause of the problem and taken action to rectify it. The forums have been closed and will remain closed until we are satisfied that there are no further issues and the forum can be safely restored to service.

In the meantime, although your TechRadar password is encrypted, we are contacting you today to let you know that if you use the same password on TechRadar for any other websites then we strongly advise you to change these passwords immediately.

We will contact you again shortly with instructions on how to update your password details for the TechRadar website.

We take the security of your data extremely seriously and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Dani AI

Generated

This thread (originally posted by , with follow-up comment from ) reports a historical site breach but lacks a compact, action-first checklist for readers who land here later. The guidance below fills that gap with practical, evidence-backed steps for both end users and site operators, plus pointers to authoritative resources.

Immediate actions to take after any reported breach:

  • Confirm the notice via the site’s official security page or reputable breach indexes, then check whether your email appears in public breach datasets (sign up for alerts if available). (haveibeenpwned.com)
  • Treat any reused credentials as compromised: update passwords on other sites where the same credential was used, starting with email and financial services, and revoke active sessions where possible.
  • If personal identifiers may have been exposed, enable monitoring/alerts for fraud and consider credit-report protections appropriate to your country.

Technical and developer notes:

  • Passwords should be stored using modern, memory- and compute-hard hashing (Argon2id, scrypt, or bcrypt with a suitable work factor), with per-account salts and proper secret management; avoid reversible encryption for authentication secrets. (cheatsheetseries.owasp.org)
  • Follow authoritative authentication guidance (choose long passphrases and avoid arbitrary complexity rules; require resets only when compromise is suspected). (pages.nist.gov)

Longer-term hardening (for everyone):

  • Use a reputable password manager to create and store unique, long passphrases for each account. ()
  • Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) wherever offered — it dramatically reduces the chance of account takeover even if credentials leak. (cisa.gov)

Note: ’s point about large services being targeted underlines why these practices should be applied across all important accounts, not just the site named in the original post.

Member Avatar for john29
john29 0 Light Poster

yes it is a good point considering the security breach that happened with yahoo, and google as well as with aol.

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