Forums Hacked

[Jeff Mottle]

All,

 

Just a quick note that some douche bag decided to hack our forums this evening, so I had to restore the database to the backup done 12 hours previous. As a result any posts made between 5am (GMT-6) and 5pm (GMT-6) on Tuesday April 30, were lost. I do apologize for the inconvenience and hopefully this will not happen again.

 

There is a full team investigating the incident now and additional precautions are being made to reduce any future data loss.

 

Jeff

[Chris MacDonald]

I did wonder why it wasn't loading last night. What i don't understand is what possible gain could someone have from hacking a community like this?! It's pointless.

[Jeff Mottle]

I ask myself the same thing every time it happens. Over the last 12 years we've been hacked on average once a year. At least hacks that we know of.

[Chris MacDonald]

Annoying, as I'd posted quite a long post to help someone, which has now gone missing. Oh well.

[Francisco Penaloza]

That really sucks glade you can put it back fast enough Jeff.

Hackers usually do those trick for several reasons first, just to try them self, also they go for the databases get as much info as they can also they get second links and possible back doors to other databases or websites, placing some back door opener codes also is common something that let them go to other places making hard to find out where the heck they really are and the list goes on and on, it is very surprising to learn how big of a business this it is.

[copain]

eek just had mine hacked to

Malware put into some files.

[Jeff Mottle]

Yes generally these hacks are at first automated looking for vulnerabilities and if the bot finds them, then a real hacker steps in to really dig around and do damage. It's always a treat to be fighting them in real-time on the server and follow their tracks. Once you're at this point though it's virtually impossible to keep up or fix/find the issue in real-time and the only thing you can do is start blocking them at the firewall and try to fix things when they stop. Fortunately we have real-time monitoring of many systems on our servers to at least give us a heads up it's happening. Still a monumental waste of time, resources and an endless source of aggrevtion. I'd love to meet one of these punks face to face and see how awesome they think they are when I'm pushing their fingers through a meat grinder

[Chris MacDonald]

Yep, that's the problem these days is that anyone can hide behind their computer and not have to face the consequences of their idiotic actions.