Chinese New Year Hack Announcement

[MrExcel]

Sometime between midnight and 1PM (GMT-5) on Sunday February 2, 2003, the message board was hacked by well-wishers who wanted to wish us a Happy Chinese New Year.

We had backups as of 1:40 AM February 1st and the board was rolled back to then.

It is lucky that we had the earlier member table loss, because that caused us to start backing up the data more frequently. If that had not happened, everything would have been lost.

This will speed up our transition to the new board. For those who have been around forever, you will remember that new board went through this progression....
1) The board came online
2) We noticed things that really annoyed us
3) Smozgur fixed those things
4) We thought up stuff that would be cool to have
5) Smozgur fixed those things
6) Repeat steps 4&5 thirty times.

When we go to the new board, we get some new functionality, so we aren't back to square one, but we will have to slowly rebuild to get a lot of the cool features back.

Bill

 

[dk]

Hi,

Just out of interest, how easy is it to hack something like this board? Can the security be improved? Has it?

When I first saw the board 'go down' I wasn't sure if it was a hoax or for real. Obviously hongxing@hacker.am (this was the hacker's supposed email address) really did delete some data. Could it be the work of a mere mortal, or would he/she need real expert knowledge of the underlying software to pull off such a stunt?

This is more a question of curiosity than anything else.

Kind regards,
Dan
This message was edited by dk on 2003-02-04 08:01

 

[Anne Troy]

Dan:

As I understand it, there was no data deleted, necessarily. They just took a recent backup and restored the site. It was probably a lot easier all around to do it that way, since you'd otherwise have to pick and choose files to restore and files to leave, always risking leaving one behind. I spoke to the guy (well, okay, via email) at the host end and he told me he didn't understand because pages like the index page still had September dates. If they'd been hacked, they should've been dated that day instead. Go figure. Anyway, I figure MAYBE the host guy was looking at the new files after they were restored, because by the time I got his reply on that piece of info, the board was back up again.