NexusMods.com hacked

Yet again it appears Nexus Mods has been hacked. Hundreds of thousands of passwords have been disclosed to the hackers and the owner Robin Scott (Dark0ne) continues to carelessly dismiss the privacy concerns highlighted by the community. The sad fact is Dark0ne was well aware of this potential security breach way back in August 2015 but has only recently disclosed the fact.

The breach appears to only affect user registrations up to mid-2013, but Nexus Mods is recommending that all users reset passwords. The hack also seems to have led to changes to modifications for certain games.

Nexus Mods representative DarkOne explained in a statement that

“it’s too ambiguous to draw any concrete conclusion”, but there is potential there has been a database breach. Thankfully “it's relatively safe to assume that whoever made this dump no longer has access to our database. Why? Because if they did, they'd have released a much more up-to-date dump of our member database.”

You should be safe if you registered after July 22nd 2013, but if not the potential hack may have compromised your user ID, username, and email address. Passwords are encrypted, but they could be broken into with time. If you’re a premium subscriber there’s no concerns about payment details since that side is handled completely by PayPal.

Meanwhile the highly sensitive details of each visitor are publically available via the extreme tracking website. Dark0ne is adamant this does not breach a visitors privacy and the sheer disregard for the visitors of his website is unbelievable.

http://extremetracking.com/open?login=skyrim

Rise of the Clones

When you make enough enemies there are bound to be consequences and Dark0ne has a lot of them. A sinister website called donaspito has emerged over the last few weeks. It's a direct copy of the nexusmods website. It's hard to trace the owner and a whois search does not reveal much. Is it a possible counterfit Chinese clone or an attempt by dark0ne to make more money.

Several users pointed out that certain mods on nexusmods are being put behind a paywall such as SkyUI. The modder uploads a sort of a demo of the mod in particular and if the downloader likes it they pay a fixed fee to get the full modification. If this is the case then the duplicate website makes a lot of sense since Dark0ne can avoid taking the blame. Dark0ne is slowly but surely introducing a paywall into the mod scene under the radar. Summer is approaching and Dark0ne needs his usual lavish holiday somewhere exotic. It's a very worrying time for creative modders.

I wouldn't recommend logging into donaspito until more information has been revealed.

http://www.donaspito.com