Pakwheels.com hacked, more than 600,000 accounts compromised

Pakwheels.com, Pakistan’s no.1 automotive classified portal was hacked and data of more than 600,000 users were compromised.

The company alerted the registered users about their servers being breached through email and asked them to change their passwords last week. The email stated,

“We recently came across a security breach in our forums software, which may have exposed some user information to a third party. The security breach was due a known vulnerability in vBulletin – the forum software used by Pakwheels.com,”

The vulnerability was fixed but the company urged the users to change their passwords to ensure security on their end.

Pakwheels.com didn’t reveal the exact number of affected accounts but HackRead confirmed from inside sources that data of about 674,775 had been compromised which included emails, passwords, Facebook sessions and other information. The inside source also stated that breach took place in October but Pakwheels.com took about two months to inform the users.

Pakwheels then decided to move away from vBulletin because of performance issues and now they are using “Discourse” forum which provides a better experience. The site reads,

“The decision to move away from vBulletin was rather simple. It had performance issues, the User Interface was not easy to use for the new users and it was generally outdated in terms of look and feel. However, finding alternative for vBulletin was pretty hard… After carefully evaluating all the available options, we decided to settle for Discourse. Discourse not only provides a superior User Experience to vBulletin but it is also lightning fast. And since it is Open Source, it has a pretty active development community out there who is constantly trying everyday to improve the platform piece by piece.”

Founded in 2003, Pakwheels.com is the biggest automotive portal of Pakistan where Pakistanis can buy and sell automobiles, read news and reviews about vehicles and find solutions to their locomotive needs. According to Alexa, the website is among 67 most visited platforms in Pakistan.

The outdated vBulletin software affected many forums in 2016 including Clash of Kings, Epic Games, Grand Theft Auto and other gaming forums.