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LiveJournal Owned

Apparently my LiveJournal account was hit by the recent “bantown” cross-site scripting attack. Thanks to Mav for pointing this out. Apparently my interests and e-mail address were both changed and LiveJournal responded by suspending my account. All this to gain control over a journal that I hadn’t ever used for original content. (When I did use it, it was merely a mirror for Aspects.)

Update Sat Jan 21: The LiveJournal abuse team handled this very quickly. My account has been reinstated and it doesn’t look like the hackers did anything annoying with it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Fragments, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “LiveJournal Owned”

  1. Deanna Says:
    January 22nd, 2006 at 5:40 am

    Oh, that’s good. I noticed your account had been deleted, which seemed really freaking weird… plus I couldn’t even ping jweill.org, so I thought you decided to just disappear off the internet :) What exactly is the bantown attack? I hadn’t heard about it.

  2. Jason Says:
    January 22nd, 2006 at 10:47 am

    I saw it mentioned on Slashdot a couple of days ago and didn’t think anything of it, but then a buddy of mine mentioned that my account was suspended. Apparently this group called “Bantown” exploited a cross-site scripting vulnerability and gained access to thousands of LiveJournal accounts. I saw an all-caps post made from a hijacked account to a community I’m in; the hackers basically just wanted the LiveJournal staff to publicly admit that LiveJournal is vulnerable to such attacks. Looks like things are cooling down now. After removing the bantown e-mail address from my account and changing my password, I’m now reinstated.