“The Data Breach…Has Been Focused Entirely on Me”
TSSZ has learned this morning there indeed was a data breach amid all this week’s follies with downtime and leaks, but it squarely targeted Sonic Retro forum administrator Dustin Wyatt as well as independent server Hapisan.com–and not necessarily anything or anyone else.
“The data breach–including my password, the leaks of Megamix material and any related attempts to spread it–has been focused entirely on me,” Wyatt said in a statement released to TSSZ this morning. He stressed Sonic Retro was not the subject of any malicious attack, but rather was in the midst of an unannounced message board software upgrade.
“(Sonic) Retro has not been compromised in any way; only a private FTP on a totally different server, to which extent we have not been able to fully analyze the damage,” Wyatt explained. “The downtime on Retro has been to upgrade the board to IPB 3.0.”
As it turns out, that FTP server was hapisan.com, on which community developer Stealth hosts a wealth of his work. Hapisan.com administrator Marc Gordon confirmed to TSSZ that the server was compromised around the same time Sonic Retro temporarily moved offline. It’s not immediately clear whether Wyatt’s data compromise and the attack on Hapisan.com are related, but Wyatt along with Stealth are members of Team Megamix, creators of Sonic Megamix. A build of Sonic Megamix along with a personal project of Stealth’s was leaked as part of the breach.
“If this guy has a vendetta against Stealth specifically, I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “I wouldn’t doubt it considering that we are intrinsically linked via Team Megamix.”
So how did those assets leak out? Wyatt explained neither project was permanently stored on the server, but it is safe to believe they were temporarily hosted on Hapisan.com “at some point.”
“That is the only way they could have been obtained by anyone,” Wyatt said. “As in, literally the only way, not just the most likely way.”
It’s not clear whether data directly from Hapisan.com, Gordon himself, or Stealth himself were compromised beyond the two project releases.
In light of this new information, we have made edits to two stories, and outright retracted one, dumping relevant information into a more recent story. We regret the confusion–and we condemn the attack.
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Man, this is getting worse by the minute.
Agreed sonickdude101, this is becoming quite the trainwreck.
Here’s to hoping we find the f*cker who did this.
Extremely demanding on the Wyatt.
Great that Retro didn’t get destroyed.