I received two updates from GiftHulk this morning regarding yesterday’s issue.

The first update was a direct response to my email:

Hi Joshua,

Here is the post that we have recently put on our Facebook wall:

“The recent attack on GiftHulk was a defacement(vandalism) attack and not a hacking attack. The vandalists did not have access to any data stored at GiftHulk – it is stored at different location than the main “face” of GiftHulk and is double-encoded.
Again – none of your information that you have entered at GiftHulk was compromised.

Defacement is generally meant as a kind of electronic graffiti, although recently it has become a means to spread messages by politically motivated “cyber protesters” or hacktivists.

We are currently working on fixing the issue. There may be some downtime for the main page.”

We will also put up the page explaining the issue at Gifthulk.com soon. No personal information was compromised.
Victor

The second update I received regarding this issue was a direct link to the previously mentioned page, “Important Notice“. Quoted from the page:

Recently, an incident has happened, in which the main page of GiftHulk.com was altered and displayed a message from Saudi Arabia hacker.

This attack on GiftHulk was a defacement (vandalism) attack and not a hacking attack.

The vandalists did not have access to any data stored at GiftHulk – it is stored at different location than the main “face” of GiftHulk and is double-encoded.

Any information that you have entered at GiftHulk was not compromised.

Defacement is generally meant as a kind of electronic graffiti, although recently it has become a means to spread messages by politically motivated “cyber protesters” or “hacktivists”.

The defacement was made possible after recent software upgrade at the hosting service and this security hole is already closed.

All the personal data that you enter at GiftHulk and your GiftHulk passwords are stored in a double-encrypted database. One of the encryptions that are used is SHA-1. SHA-1 was designed by the United States National Security Agency and published by the United States NIST as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard.

The issue is resolved and they have it under control. When the issue happened I saw a few people across the social networks freak out over this and say they’re leaving the site, but if you care at all: I’ll be sticking around as a member.

In my post yesterday I explained what the issue likely was, and fortunately I was correct. Hopefully we won’t see any further issues, and I would still recommend joining the site if you aren’t a member, or remaining a member if you are. Here’s proof of payment.