Blender website taken offline following cyberattack

Zero-day attack
(Image credit: Shutterstock) (Image credit: Shutterstock.com)

The website of popular open-source 3D computer graphics software Blender went offline yesterday as a result of a hacking attempt.

A comprehensive, professional 3D modelling program, Blender is one of the crown jewels of open source software. The cross-platform app has been under development for close to three decades and is available as a free download, helping users create 3D models and animate them. 

Yesterday, Blender’s official Twitter account tweeted that “the http://blender.org website is undergoing maintenance due to a hacking attempt,” as its maintainers took stock of the intrusion.

Back online

Even as it took the main page offline, Blender announced that most of its online infrastructure, including the documentation wiki, the developer Git repositories, as well as its blender.chat chat server was still available and continued to function normally.

After the developers had verified the integrity of the downloads by checking the checksums of all the files, the project even resumed the downloads. However, the main website as well as some of the other sections still remained offline.

From the timing of the tweets it appears that the developers were working through the night to check and verify each and every asset of the website, which was still not available till earlier today.

At the timing of writing, a majority of the website was back up online some of the sections, in particular the News, Press Releases, and Development Blog, were still not back up and instead asked visitors to read a cached version of the page from the Internet Archive.

Apart from the tweets giving out the status of the recovery, no details about the cyberattack have been put out by the project, yet.

Via: BleepingComputer

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.