Quote from: TheQuin on June 03, 2018, 08:01:45 AM

Before reading your post I didn't know anything about how the 2015 hack occurred. It shows that the forum itself is very secure but if the service provider gets phished into resetting the root password that all gets bypassed. The problem with individual accounts getting hacked is that they are inactive accounts so they are unaware that they need to change their passwords. I would guess all the easy passwords were broken a long time ago and hackers are cracking some of the more difficult ones now.

The Pharmacist was spot on when he said:

Quote from: The Pharmacist on June 02, 2018, 02:55:17 PM

I have a feeling--and I'm probably stating the obvious here--that a lot of hacked bitcointalk accounts have been sold outside of this forum, because I've seen numerous old-time accounts that suddenly woke up in October 2017, changed their writing style, and started posting in a typical bounty hunter fashion. Shitposts in the Altcoin Discussion section, mostly. I tagged a number of them one night after doing some "research" in that section.

Around 2017 the list from the 2015 hack appeared on the darknet. I think a lot of dormant legacy accounts were sold then.

Quote from: puzzling_rvat on June 03, 2018, 08:04:39 AM

An interesting article that is really attractive to read and know the history of this forum about. Many thanks for such an excursion into the history. I think this will be useful to all forum participants.

I knew the forum had been hacked a couple of times but didn't know the details. It was only when I made a general timeline of events in crypto history that I discovered that the hacks / vandalism were quite interesting. Doing this post made me realise there was a strong connection between Bitcointalk and Mark Karpeles which led me to the next project : Bitcointalk history of MtGox and how a Bitcointalk post caught the MtGox hacker.