Usenet Crawler Server Breached

Last Updated: Feb 10, 2021

A lot of users of NZB site, Usenet Crawler, have recently been having problems accessing the website due to connection timeout or server problems. During our most recent check, Usenet Crawler has not been performing well during the past year in terms of website response time and uptime.

Uptime Concerns

While most active NZB sites present a 99% to 100% uptime for their websites, Usenet Crawler has just been generating an uptime rate of only about 90%. And as of writing, it’s January 2021 uptime was only at 9.62%.

Based on our active monitoring, Usenet Crawler’s uptime activity has been fluctuating for several months now with connection timeout constantly recurring, sometimes lasting for several minutes or up to a long period of time.

Server Breach

According to its site administrator, a Usenet Crawler server was breached. This served as the administrator’s personal development machine and is also the staging server for all that Usenet Crawler has. This includes all the source code, allowed access to restricted areas and all of the admin’s passwords and crypto wallets.

While it is quite unclear when this incident occurred, based on relevant facts, this may have happened over the period of several months since the site admin apologizes for leaving its users in the dark.

Status

Currently, the site is coming back online but Usenet Crawler admits that it will take quite some time as they have to go through every file, backup and log file before copying them to new servers to make sure that no tampering occurred. They also want to assure users that no information was stored except for email addresses. Passwords are securely stored and log files older than 24 hours have all IP addresses hashed.

For now, the Usenet Crawler indexer is up. However, no registration is currently allowed and only 1 API key is available for abuse. All site features will also be free for the next 6 months and they will continue to offer unlimited API to all of their users after 6 months.

UPDATE:

Based on information released on their website, certain Usenet Crawler services are still offline including their main indexer, outgoing mail, tertiary indexer and VIP Usenet accounts. In the meantime, their chat service, incoming mail and secondary indexer is back online.