Forum was Hacked

[drcollie]

The Forum was unavailable this morning as sometime between midnight last and 8 a.m., it was hacked into on the FTP server and all the scripts changed. Took me three hours to repair it and undo the damage, and it looks as though everything is still intact on posts and such.

I throw several spammers off daily on the forum that are from India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe that have IP addresses from those countries so my guess is someone decided to get some retribution in return. They obviously compromised my passwords and were able to change all the programming scripts at the host server, but I was eventually able to restore the files. If you made a post or PM early this morning and its not there, you may want to resubmit.

[organic_smallhome]

OMG. What a nightmare. And what a horrible waste of your time.

[ckeefer]

I was wondering what happened....how insane! Well glad you were able to get it fixed fairly easily!

[BrentB]

How sad and pathetic.

Good work Duane.

[drcollie]

I was a little freaked out this morning when I saw it had been hacked into and all the scripts changed. There were appx. 150 files I had to revert back to the old way, and I'm not really a computer guy, so I wasn't sure I could repair it, but I just crossed my fingers and dove in.

I never understand why some people get a kick out of cyber-vandalism, but they spend a lot of time trying to tear things up for some reason.

[KNEEBITER]

How do we know that you are you? We need some I.D

[drcollie]

The forum was attacked again last night and out-of-service until about 11 a.m. this morning. I'm going to purchase new software from v.Bulletin and have them professionally install it. Hopefully that will eliminate the hackers getting into it at the server level. So if you see changes or that its down for a period of time, please be patient. Thanks...

[mcarey]

Duane-
The forum was greatly missed this morning, as it has become part of my daily morning routine! Thanks so much for getting it back up and running!

[drcollie]

Working on it, Marianne! Whomever is hacking it is doing it between 1 a.m and 7 a.m. EST, so its probably someone in China, Philippines, Eastern Europe, etc. I ordered $ 375 worth of new software and pro installation of it today to get the latest security patches and versions, and reset all Admin/Server passwords to hopefully keep them out. What a huge waste of time and expense to go behind these mutts and clean everything up so it works again.

[aaron]

That's very unusual. You're on a hosted account, so I would expect the server to be well-patched, and (absent having your account information) a hacker shouldn't be able to mess with files on the server (as opposed to the database). You're taking the correct security steps.

I've been slow about migrating to vBulletin 4.x, even though I own licenses for my forums, because it's such a bear to skin (although last I checked they were promising some improvements). I assume you're moving to 4.x, and there are quite a few free styles to consider here - it's much easier to modify the graphics from and make modifications to an existing style than to completely reskin a forum.