A campaign page on Indiegogo was hacked over the weekend, making it appear as if the Indiegogo team itself had taken down the campaign and closed the page. However, the hack does not appear to be indicative of a wider breach of Indiegogo security. Instead, it seems the hackers were able to guess the account password which allowed them to make edits to the page.
Indiegogo says that after detecting the campaign’s account password had been compromised, it froze the campaign. And now the password has been reset and the campaign will be back online shortly. (It was not at the time of publication.)
Reddit was the first place to notice the change, which took place over the weekend. The page in question was a campaign led by a group called The Fine Young Capitalists (TFYC), which ultimately was about raising awareness of the issues surrounding women in gaming, by generating funds that would pay the salaries of several female game developers to make any game they wanted – ostensibly those free from the typical sexism when it comes to female character development. Meanwhile, profits from the games produced were to go to cancer research.
According to a post on TFYC’s blog, they were initially unsure whether or not all the funds they raised were still there. But a later update says no money was lost.
It’s unclear at this time who was responsible for the hacking, or how an 8-character alpha numeric password was able to be guessed by the attacker, but it does point out the potential need for increased security options on Indiegogo’s site, like 2-factor authentication, for instance.
This attack was not one of hackers looking to take on Indiegogo as a whole, but was related to a specific online controversy between gamers and their supporters which TFYC was involved in. The narrative involves Zoe Quinn, the game developer who was reportedly sexually harassed. Further details came out after news about her story hit that put her claims into question.
That has led to an ongoing mini-war between the two sides in this matter, which 4chan has also been involved in. According to a story in The Daily Dot earlier this month, 4chan reportedly hacked and outed Quinn’s biggest supporter. [Update: several commenters have asked me to clarify this part: reportedly means it has been reported, but it is not/was not confirmed.] TFYC’s Indiegogo hack could be seen in retaliation of that, but nothing is confirmed at this time.