Notice of security breach on Ubuntu Forums site
Jane Silber
on 21 July 2013
There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums site, ubuntuforums.org. We take information security and user privacy very seriously, and apologise for the breach and ensuing inconvenience.
At this time,
- We have confirmed the attackers were able to access all user email addresses and hashed passwords on the Forums site. While the passwords were not stored in plain text, good practice dictates that users should assume the passwords have been accessed and change them. If users used the same password on other services they should immediately change that password.
- We believe the issue is limited to the Ubuntu Forums and no other Ubuntu or Canonical site or service is affected.
- We have begun the process of notifying by email all users whose details have been compromised.
- We are continuing to investigate exactly how the attackers were able to gain access and are working with the software providers to address that issue. Once the investigation is concluded we will provide as much detail as we safely can.
The forums site will remain down until we can safely bring it up, and updates will be posted to the ubuntuforums.org page as they are available. Once again, we apologise for the issue.
In the meantime, if you’re using Ubuntu and need technical support please see the following page for support:
If you’re looking for a place to discuss Ubuntu we encourage you to check out these sites:
The Ubuntu subreddit
Talk to us today
Interested in running Ubuntu in your organisation?
Newsletter signup
Related posts
From sales development to renewals: Mariam Tawakol’s career progression at Canonical
Career progression doesn’t follow a single path – and at Canonical, we embrace that. Our culture encourages individuals to explore roles aligned with their...
In pursuit of quality: UX for documentation authors
Canonical’s Platform Engineering team has been hard at work crafting documentation in Rockcraft and Charmcraft around native support for web app frameworks...
Canonical announces Charmed Feast: A production-grade feature store for your open source MLOps stack
July 10, 2025: Today, Canonical announced the release of Charmed Feast, an enterprise solution for feature management with seamless integration with Charmed...