The outage on Sunday

[MrExcel]

Hi Everyone,

Here is an update on why the board was down for most of Sunday:

We were hacked. This is the second time the board has been hacked. If you were around long enough, you might recall the Chinese New Year hack back in early 2003. ("Happy New Year - to help you get a fresh start, we removed half of your posts!").

Smozgur jumped right in to investigate this hack. The person had found a back door at the site. About a year ago, I was trying to distribute the podcasts via BitTorrent. In order to see the BitTorrent clients, I had created a folder where the public was allowed to write files. When I abandoned the BitTorrent idea, I never CHMOD the folder back to be private. The hacker loaded a small script to that folder that deleted the user table from the board. We have the I.P. address that executed the command, which provides a name, e-mail, telephone, and postal address in Serbia. Of course, there is a good chance that the I.P. was spoofed and this is not the real person.

We have a daily backup, and it appears that only four people had signed up between the backup and the attack. So, to those four people, ("I could have sworn I signed up yesterday!") - I'm sorry - but you will have to sign up again.

Since the hacker didn't delete the message table, it does not appear that we lost any posts.

By about midnight eastern time in the US, Smozgur had restored the file and had closed the backdoor. I really want to thank him for spending a good deal of time on Sunday investigating the problem.

If you notice any strangeness, please drop a note to suat at MrExcel.com.

Bill

 

[Richard Schollar]

Thanks for letting us all know Bill - I did wonder why the Board wasn't available yesterday. I think it's terrible that, given this board provides a very valuable service to those in need of help with Excel/Access and in my own case has functioned as the most amazing learning resource I've ever come across, someone could risk destroying all that. For what reason? The Board is free (to users) and does nothing but good things...

So thank you Smozgur & Bill!!

 

[NateO]

It's pretty senseless, eh, Richard? Some people have some awfully strange hobbies!

Thanks Bill & Suat, for getting the board back up and running!

 

[lenze]

We were hacked.

Darn, you don't say!! I thought I was just to hung-over to navigate the board properly.

lenze

 

[Peter_SSs]

I would like to add my thanks for..
a) Letting us know what happened (even though the explanation didn't suit lenze )
b) Anyone who put in extra effort to get back up and running.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Thanks Bill and Suat

I don't know why people do this to such a huge resource.

Thanks again for getting it back on air

Denis

 

[steve case]

Thanks for the details.

I poked my nose in this direction that Sunday, and didn't think anything about it other than, "Oh, they crashed, fancy that!" and went about my other surfing activities.

And I will take this opportunity to once again thank you all for running what is for me the most valuable site on the net. If it weren't for this place all the little toys I've built for people over the years wouldn’t run as slick as they do or at all.