Nvidia suffers data breach; investigation under way

Nvidia has suffered a security breach that affected its developer forums, the hardware maker said.

The company said it had suspended operations on the forums and "immediately began an investigation," and continues to work around the clock to bring the forums back to life. 

The bright side --- if we can call it that --- is that its security efforts appear on the face of it better than the companies who also recently suffered data breaches, notably LinkedIn, eHarmony, and Last.fm (Last.fm and ZDNet are both owned by CBS.)

The site said that "hashed passwords with random salt value" may have been stolen, but it goes above and beyond the practice of most companies that have suffered breaches in the last couple of months.

Many of the passwords stolen in previous attacks by the companies aforementioned did not salt the passwords, making their decryption easier.

Nvidia said it "did not store any passwords in clear text," but publicly accessible information --- such as birthday, gender, location and so on --- may have also been taken, the website says. 

It will send all users to its forums a temporary password with instructions on how to change it, and all user passwords for Nvidia's forums will be reset once the system boots back up again. 

On Thursday, Yahoo suffered a data breach that saw more than 450,000 user account details --- including email addresses and passwords --- leaked online.

Included in the cache were Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL account details, sister site CNET reports, but less than 5 percent of passwords were valid.

Questions have been sent to Nvidia, and we'll update the post should we hear back.