Account Hijackings Force LiveJournal Changes: Hackers Claim 900,000 Accounts

[Kristijntje]

LiveJournal, an online community that boasts nearly 2 million active members, on Thursday announced sitewide changes for users logging into their accounts -- changes prompted by a hacker group's successful hijacking of potentially hundreds of thousands of user accounts.

An established hacker group known as "Bantown"...claimed responsibility for the break-in, which it said was made possible due to a series of Javascript security flaws in the LiveJournal site.

A trusted source in the security community put me in touch with this group, and several Bantown members spoke at length in an online instant-message chat with Security Fix. During the chat, members of the group claimed to have used the Javascript holes to hijack more than 900,000 LiveJournal accounts...

full article: http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/security...jacki.html

Post on LiveJournal's forums:

Changes to User Subdomains
Starting tonight, you can now reach your journal and community at a new, shorter user subdomain. No action is needed on your part.

All journals will now be located at http://username.livejournal.com.
All communities will now be located at http://community.livejournal.com/username.

We realize this is a big change, and that many of you will have questions. Here are some answers to questions you may have:

    * Why is LiveJournal making this change now?
      Recent changes to a popular browser have enabled malicious users to potentially gain control of your account. As soon as we heard about it, we began implementing changes to protect your account, and this is one of the last steps of the required changes. The rest will be happening in the next few days. We'll post to our development journal with more in-depth details about these changes...

full post: http://news.livejournal.com/90556.html