openqda.org has been taken over

[jankapunkt]

Dear OpenQDA users,

as of today we were experiencing a critical attack, that lead to a takeover of our production website at https://openqda.org
Due this circumstance we were forced to disconnect the server instance from the web to protect users from further harm and for further investigation.

Note, that we were running a nightly backup of our database and project files.
We are right now actively investigating the cause / attack vector and will not disclose further information until our investigation is complete.

However, we will keeping this discussion updated, once we have further information about the cause and consequences.
If we cannot restore the production app in time, we will inform you about an alternative strategy to restore your projects.

We truly apologize for this circumstance and do our best to resolve the situation.

Update 02nd January 2025

• the service is fully restored
• ~95% of all projects are restored
• we have an encoding issue remaining, please contact us if you cannot open files

Update January 8th 2026

We have restored 99% of the data. According to our analysis, there should be no lost project. However, we still have some maintenance left:

• user profile images are still not displayed correctly
• some files still have encoding issues
• the RTF and audio conversion is not working properly

We are actively working on these issues.

[kadewe]

Just a first short update. We have analyzed the situation and are patching the server.
We will bring up the server again hopefully on Monday and give a post-mortem.

Also, if you are reading this and happen to be the person hacking our server, as you were linking to a benign german telegram group, we would ask you to submit an anonymous report on your attack vector to [email protected] - thanks.

[kadewe]

OpenQDA is back online.
We were struck by a new exploit reported on 26.12.2026 in a library we were using. We have patched the issue and are now checking if everythingbis running smoothly again. If you find problems, please report to us.

We are now writing reports to the relevant authorities and will do in depth analysis, if and what data was exposed.