Utorrent Community Passwords Compromised

The uTorrent app is the world’s most popular BitTorrent client, and for good reason. It is very small and compact when compared to competing products and has over 150 million users from around the globe. With this being the case, it’s no surprise the app’s community forum booms with activity, a boon for hackers seeking valuable information.

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind uTorrent, reveals that its forums have been hacked in recent times and as such, the company is advising its users to change their passwords as soon as possible. The company went on to state that it was made aware of the problem via the vendor that powers the strong community forum.

There seems to be some confusion of the extent of the hack due to this statement made by uTorrent:

The vulnerability appears to have been through one of the vendor’s other clients,” BitTorrent Inc. went on to add. “However it allowed attackers to access some information on other accounts. As a result, attackers were able to download a list of our forum users.

What’s even more interesting is that the company has yet to notify users directly through email or even from its Twitter account, of which only a single tweet was issued since the year 2016 began. We do not believe this is how a company should handle a situation when information hacks like these have taken place. Not every user of the forum will be on hand to see the advisory, and as such, they should be notified by email or on social media.

As a precaution, we are advising our users to change their passwords. While the passwords may not be used as a vector on the forums, those hashed passwords should be considered compromised.

Last month, Microsoft banned easy-to-guess passwords from being made. Joining that were the over 65 million Tumblr passwords that were made leaked by hackers, along with the over 400 million from MySpace. We suggest folks use strong passwords and completely different passwords for each and every account on the web. To keep up with these passwords, use a password manager.

Here are the top five password managers that you can try out.