Hello everyone,
A little late notice but I needed to get the forum almost to it's previous state.
As most of you are aware, our main page was hacked by some Turkey hackers either on the 22nd or 26th of December. We didn't lose much backup because our host does hourly backups automatically, so minimal posts are lost during the process; yay! I managed to get our forum temporarily in the meantime that our forum host restored us to pre-hack state.
After that, I made a decision (of course with the approval of the Admins), if we got hacked again, we'd upgrade to 4.x and we'd stick to a stock theme (I'll explain why in a bit).
A few days ago, you might of seen our forum in Maintenance Mode. The reason for it? You guessed it, we were hacked again. This time it was more of a threat. They managed to get into another Administrator account I have setup. I'm not exactly sure how they did it but they did it. One of the good things is that I was here. I noticed the administrator account was logged in so I started researching. Quickly checked the logs and noticed we were being attacked. I quickly banned the person and traced it to an account that was recently created. I also traced the IP and it was the Turkey Hackers once again. All that happened in a matter of 5-10 minutes or so. I had fixed the errors that the hacker had done (changed a couple things here and there), but I didn't feel secure enough anymore 'til our host restored us to the pre-hacker state once again. This time though, our host took far longer than what I expected (6+ hours).
Post-Restore
Once the forum was restored, I started the upgrading process. I wasn't comfortable opening the forum 'til I had taken some extra precautions; obviously I wont mention them on a public thread but I'm hoping it was enough to stop these hackers.
I got most of our forum modifications up and running; sorry if I didn't save most of the Kompetitions stuff. On the upside, we now have extra goodies on our forum, e.i. Pirate Poker (no minors), Downloads Center, a portal (w00t!), and more things to come!
The Downsides:
I know most of you are asking where the heck is our dark-theme. I miss it myself but after being hacked the 1st time I noticed 1 thing: only 1-theme was hacked, which was our dark-theme. I'm not exactly sure what it means but I have a theory and I'll explain it a bit. Our forum used to be in 3.8.6, which was up-to-date. Our theme though was a different story. The dark-theme we were using was meant for 3.8.5. Aesthetically, everything looked the same and it worked. But vBulletin updates their product for a reason; security holes. And since the dark-theme was the only theme that was hacked, I'm assuming this was the reason for the breach. We wont know if it was the culprit or not until... well, I wouldn't even want it to happen again. With that said, that is the only reason why I wish to stay with the white theme. I'd like to keep everyone happy but at this point, I'd rather have some peace of mind.
You're more than welcome to post comments, and/ or questions.
A little late notice but I needed to get the forum almost to it's previous state.
As most of you are aware, our main page was hacked by some Turkey hackers either on the 22nd or 26th of December. We didn't lose much backup because our host does hourly backups automatically, so minimal posts are lost during the process; yay! I managed to get our forum temporarily in the meantime that our forum host restored us to pre-hack state.
After that, I made a decision (of course with the approval of the Admins), if we got hacked again, we'd upgrade to 4.x and we'd stick to a stock theme (I'll explain why in a bit).
A few days ago, you might of seen our forum in Maintenance Mode. The reason for it? You guessed it, we were hacked again. This time it was more of a threat. They managed to get into another Administrator account I have setup. I'm not exactly sure how they did it but they did it. One of the good things is that I was here. I noticed the administrator account was logged in so I started researching. Quickly checked the logs and noticed we were being attacked. I quickly banned the person and traced it to an account that was recently created. I also traced the IP and it was the Turkey Hackers once again. All that happened in a matter of 5-10 minutes or so. I had fixed the errors that the hacker had done (changed a couple things here and there), but I didn't feel secure enough anymore 'til our host restored us to the pre-hacker state once again. This time though, our host took far longer than what I expected (6+ hours).
Post-Restore
Once the forum was restored, I started the upgrading process. I wasn't comfortable opening the forum 'til I had taken some extra precautions; obviously I wont mention them on a public thread but I'm hoping it was enough to stop these hackers.
I got most of our forum modifications up and running; sorry if I didn't save most of the Kompetitions stuff. On the upside, we now have extra goodies on our forum, e.i. Pirate Poker (no minors), Downloads Center, a portal (w00t!), and more things to come!
The Downsides:
I know most of you are asking where the heck is our dark-theme. I miss it myself but after being hacked the 1st time I noticed 1 thing: only 1-theme was hacked, which was our dark-theme. I'm not exactly sure what it means but I have a theory and I'll explain it a bit. Our forum used to be in 3.8.6, which was up-to-date. Our theme though was a different story. The dark-theme we were using was meant for 3.8.5. Aesthetically, everything looked the same and it worked. But vBulletin updates their product for a reason; security holes. And since the dark-theme was the only theme that was hacked, I'm assuming this was the reason for the breach. We wont know if it was the culprit or not until... well, I wouldn't even want it to happen again. With that said, that is the only reason why I wish to stay with the white theme. I'd like to keep everyone happy but at this point, I'd rather have some peace of mind.
You're more than welcome to post comments, and/ or questions.
