The technology press are reporting a serious flaw recently discovered in a particular version of popular online discussion platform, vBulletin, which makes it vulnerable to the possibility of personal data harvesting. As reported by the BBC (see Firm scrambles to patch vBulletin software flaw) “The flaw in a specific version of the vBulletin software allows anyone to easily access the main administrator username and password for a site.”

A patch, and fix, has since been released for the platform by the developers and users are recommended to patch the particular version as soon as possible.The affected platform version was 3.8.6 which was made available on 13th July 2010 and the fix was made available on 21st July 2010.

vBulletin is a popular platform for operating online discussion forums and has been in the community for over ten years. Developed for use with PHP and popular open source database application MySQL the application is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

For more information visit the vBulletin article Security Patch Release 3.8.6 PL1.