Posting on Mumsnet, Roberts said: “An armed response team turned up at my house last week in the middle of the night, after reports of a gunman prowling around”. A second Mumsnet user who engaged with @DadSecurity on Twitter was also visited by armed police in the middle of the night, following a report of gunshots.
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“We are looking into what we can do to strengthen our defences against phishing, but in the meantime we need to ask you to be vigilant, and to check the URL of the login page for the foreseeable future”, Ms Roberts wrote.
Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and another user were both targeted in swatting attacks at the apex of a series of hack attacks that may have led to the compromise of user logins at the high-profile, UK-based parenting site.
“On the night of Tuesday 11 August, Mumsnet came under attack from what’s known as denial of service (DDoS) attack, she wrote”.
‘Our servers were bombarded with requests, which required our internet service provider to massively increase server capacity to cope. The Twitter account has now been suspended.
She added: “It’s worth saying that we don’t believe these addresses were gained directly from any Mumsnet hack, as we don’t collect addresses”. The aim is to get the police to mobilize a team-in America this is usually a SWAT team, hence the name-to investigate.
The Metropolitan Police have been contacted for comment.
Scotland Yard confirmed armed police were sent to an address in Islington, where Ms Roberts owns a semi-detached house in the same street as London Mayor Boris Johnson.
“To add to the “fun”, it seems @DadSecurity also resorted to swatting attacks”.
Shortly after the site’s outage Mumsnet locked down all access to its admin functions and reported the attack to the police. In April 2014 the site was attacked using the Heartbleed bug, which was used to access data from all users’ accounts. It does not sound like a pleasant start to the day, and she explained that it followed attacks on the site and its systems. There is evidence of 11 user accounts being hacked.
Ms Roberts also disclosed that someone had managed to hack into the site’s administrative functions. We were confident that users’ passwords had not been accessed, because MNHQ doesn’t hold them as plain text; they’re all encrypted, so that no one – not even us – can see them.
Further problems were detected over the weekend when a user reported that posts made under her name hadn’t been written by her.
Mumsnet is now reviewing its online security and has asked all users to change their passwords.
“The longer a hacker is able to roam free, the more information they can get and, in order to limit the damage both on and offline, getting them out as soon as possible is imperative”.
However, a new account claiming to be run by the same group appeared yesterday, and posted two links to pages purporting to contain more than 3,000 Mumsnet usernames and passwords.
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Police were told that a woman had been murdered at the Islington address which Ms Roberts shares with her husband, Newsnight editor Ian Katz.
