The official Ubuntu forums have been down for a few days now, with the homepage simply showing a notice that they've been deliberately taken down to deal with a security issue. But worse than that, passwords, usernames and  email addresses have all been stolen.

“There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. The Canonical IS team is working hard as we speak to restore normal operations. This page will be updated with progress reports,” reads the top notice on the site. Underneath however, is the bad news: all personal information from people's accounts has been stolen. The good news however, is that the passwords were not stored in plain text, but in salted hashes.

Despite this, it's probably a good idea to change your password when the forums come back and anywhere else where you might have used the same one.

The only other information on the page currently, is a progress report, breaking down what's happened and the current situation on the site's return. The first defacement was noticed on the 20th of this month, leading to the take down of the forums later that day. As it stands, the team behind the running of the forums is reinstalling everything to clean out any backdoors, though no posts or private messages will be lost as part of the revamp.

No time frame is given for the site's return, but anyone wanting to discuss Ubuntu in the mean time, is being directed to the subreddit.

KitGuru Says: Change your passwords people. In situations like this, always be changing. 

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