Whoa! Didja see the AAW Forums this AM?

[Jim Underwood]

Apologize if this goes against the TOS. Feel free to move or delete this.

I was going to post a question over on the AAW forums this AM. But of course, you can't see the forums there. A hacker got in and stuffed it. :mad:

Hope nothing like that happens over here.

Just sayin...

[charlie knighton]

i guess there are rats in every wood pile

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Jim,

That happened once before when the big stink was going on over there. I hope they are able to track the idiot down and prosecute him.

[Alan Zenreich]

Last time they were able to get the forum up and running in a few hours.

The data/messages are still there, but the home page and style sheets have been hacked.

[Roger Chandler]

I wondered what had happened. The site says owned by Blackhunter,D3, and the forum is totally inoperable. :eek::eek::eek:

I figured it got hacked, but was not sure if there was something on this end of the internet in my part of the country that was the problem, but it sounds like it is definitely the site itself.

[Jerome Hanby]

I know nothing about those forums or what software they use, but if they got hit big from outside it's almost certainly their own fault. I put together a web site for a "guild" of buddies of mine. We had been playing mmorpgs for a decade before anyone dreamed up that speech garbling acronym. It was just inter and intra game stuff of zero importance to anyone outside the guild (and not much use to any of us inside) and I spent zero extra effort securing the site. It was pretty funny. Someone put the Perl equivalent of the Norton utilities into a file with a ".jpg" extension and attached it to a message and posted the message. Then they executed that "jpg" and used my own host computer to brute force hack a password. Was actually pretty funny. I spent about four hours figuring out what they did and how, about an hour repairing the site, and about 10 minutes securing the site so a similar attack was impossible in the future.

This recent attack reminds me of seeing a post complaining about tear out at the table saw and the attached photo showing the blade installed backwards.

[patrick michael stein]

seems to be fine now

[David DeCristoforo]

There's just too many fourteen year old kids with too much time on their hands!

[Jim Silva]

It's likely a vulnerability in the forum software they use. Not necessarily anything that the AAW forum guys can do about so they may need to update some software.

This kind of thing happens quite a bit through the host that handles an account also. Again, usually quite apart from the control of the forum managers control. I'm not sure what their hosting arrangements are so any of this is pure speculation.

J.

[Michael James]

I
This recent attack reminds me of seeing a post complaining about tear out at the table saw and the attached photo showing the blade installed backwards.
That was NOT me..................:cool: