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Someone with bad intentions exploited a previously unknown security flaw (a zero-day exploit) in imgur in order to deploy a botnet which DDoS'd 8chan (and possibly may do some more nasty things). As a result, malwarebytes blacklisted imgur. Imgur claims that it is fixed, but malwarebytes still did not lifted the ban because it doesn't seems safe yet.

Link for further details: https://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?/topic/173238-malwarebytes-blocking-imgur/

Since all the StackExchange / StackOverflow network is heavily dependent on imgur for images, it is not working correctly for malwarebytes users. Most of images renders as broken images since they were blocked by malwarebytes.

Now, the actual question: What is the possibility that the exploit could/would compromise SE/SO users, if any? Specially if the vulnerability is not fixed after all?

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Imgur already patched this particular vulnerability:

Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered that made it possible to inject malicious code into an image link on Imgur. From our team’s analysis, it appears the exploit was targeted specifically to users of 4chan and 8chan via images shared to a specific sub-reddit on Reddit.com using Imgur’s image hosting and sharing tools. The affected images were not published to the galleries on Imgur.com.

The vulnerability was patched yesterday evening and we’re no longer serving affected images, but as a precaution we recommend that you clear your browsing data, cookies, and localstorage.

I'm not sure if SE would have been affected as they insert the images from Imgur directly and nobody actually visits the Imgur website where the images are hosted and where the malicious javascript was inserted as far as I understand.

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