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[H] Forum hacked...

L

lowrider69

Senior member
Don't know if anybody cares here but I assume there's some of us who also visit Hard Forums(HardOCP). Anyway, Hard forum was hacked a few days ago. Kyle was honest and to the point and had this to say.

"The forums were hacked.

We have been hacked three times in 13 years. We are not sure the motivation this time, but it was not "malicious." In the past it has been spammers/phishers using our resources to send out their mails. This time, like before, nothing was damaged, there were simply processes running that were invisible to us and using all the box's resources. Box is a dual Quad Xeon with 16GB of RAM. It took them at least 3 days to get in (from what we can see in the logs), and these guys were very very slick. Have to give them kudos on their talents. I am sure they are making plenty of money with their skill set.

From our past experience with this, we have learned that it is best to start from ground zero in the box that was compromised. So we are doing a full OS and vBulletin install. It has been a couple of years since we did this so there are some upgrades to be made as well.

We have put a measure in place to safeguard us from downtime like this in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience."
 
WhiteFireDragon said:
lol why so much hate? i'm not too active there, but what's so bad about it?
Click to expand...

I have posted there perhaps 6 times. Mostly, I go there and read the threads because, quite honestly, some of the topics discussed in their sub forums are better than the stuff here or their user base tackle different issues that AT folk just don't venture into or "blog" about.

Thanks for the post OP, i was curious as to why I couldn't access it earlier this week.
 
her209 said:
Does that mean all user accounts and threads have been erased? Yikes!
Click to expand...

Only if they don't have any backups.... and considering they claimed no damage and they still had a 'running' system they should easily be able to dump the data for a restore.
 
Why's everyone talking about backups and things being lost? Didn't he just say that it wasn't malicious, and the person was only using the systems resources?

How does that attribute to "omgawd they deleted everything and we have no backups!111!1"

Did I miss some back story?

Oh, and "starting from zero" and "starting from ground zero" are two entirely different things.
 
Everything seems o.k., they're up and running. I always considered AT and [H] quality sites for tech information so I thought it sucked they got messed with.

There's a locked thread about this under "Forum Help & Feedback" on their forums which is where I got the quote from Kyle.
 
Wasn't a big vulnerability just announced a week or two ago to vBulletin (new version)? Maybe they were one of the ones who decided to update the software before waiting to see if others had problems with the update? Note to Anand & those who decide when to do the updates to vBulletin - don't use THEIR version! 😛
 
It'd be awesome if it was someone from a distributed computing team who just needed a few more processors to crunch WUs 😀
 
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