Open Diary - Security

Security

The Open Diary website has been the victim of two major hacking attacks.

On September 11, 2004, the Open Diary database server was hacked, resulting in the loss of eleven weeks worth of diary entries for all members. Bruce Ableson offered a cash bounty for information leading to the arrest of the hacker, and the FBI was involved in the investigation. On February 2, 2006, Ableson introduced $100 Lifetime subscriptions, stating that this new membership level was created to raise money after declining subscription rates in the period following the 2004 hacker attack caused Open Diary to go into debt. Lifetime members were told they would be given extra features, communication, and consideration beyond the OD Plus level. However, as of Spring 2012, these subscriptions are no longer available due to lack of responsiveness from site administrators.

On August 28, 2008, Open Diary was again hacked. Ableson took the site offline, with a message on the front page stating that there had been a security breach and the email addresses and passwords of some users had been compromised, but that no diary content had been lost. The site went back online on August 29, with a post from Ableson stating that over 2,000 users' email addresses and passwords had been compromised by a script exploiting a weakness in the site's security. Affected users were assigned temporary passwords and notified by email.