News broke today that the website belonging to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization has been hacked and usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords were stolen. The website which is used by ANSTO to allow scientists to schedule time using the facilities synchrotron particle accelerator is aparantly not connected to any of the facilities other systems, so it seems the damage is limited to just the leaking of the personal info. It is not yet known who the hackers are or how they managed to gain access to the user data other than it was through a ‘security vulnerability’.
Users of the website have been asked to reset their passwords. No details have yet been released on how the passwords were encrypted as if it is through weak encryption such as MD5 then users of the site may need to reset passwords for other services if they used the same password elsewhere.