Editing ZooVille (section)

== September 2019 data leak ==
When the site first launched, it used the well-known vBulletin 5 forum software. When the site fell victim several months later to a then-undisclosed security exploit (known as a "zero-day" attack), the vBulletin user database became exposed and was exfiltrated by an unknown attacker. The same fate was suffered by many vBulletin-based web sites during the same time period, consistently resulting in similar data exposures.<ref name="security">{{Cite web|last=Zorz|first=Zeljka|date=2020-08-11|title=Exploits for vBulletin zero-day released, attacks are ongoing|url=https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/08/11/fix-cve-2019-16759/|website=Help Net Security|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201014061737if_/https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/08/11/fix-cve-2019-16759/|archive-date=2020-10-14|access-date=2025-12-20|df=mdy-all}}</ref> Later analysis concluded that the attack wasn't targeted towards ZooVille specifically, and to-date no extortion demands or other attempts to leverage the data have been directed at the moderation team. Those first eight months of operation using vBulletin from February to September 2019 have since been dubbed by several community members as the "ZooVille v1.0" phase (a reference to software versioning and more specifically early, untested releases).

Shortly after the security breach, ZooVille switched to using the Xenforo forum software. In the interests of member security, no records from the original database were migrated and all previous members were required to re-register using an encrypted email service. Other measures to increase overall security were also put into place at this time, including purging user IP addresses from the server logs on a regular basis, in the hopes of minimizing the attack surface surrounding user identity in the event of another data loss event.