Forum disruption

[John Smith]

Unfortunately, we had a slight setback on Thursday afternoon - hackers managed to hijack the server running the forum software and they attempted to take over the machine - using it to send lots of spam emails.

Fortunately(?), they got a bit too greedy, and their actions caused the server to completely crash.

It does not appear that any personal data was accesed by the hackers and the service is running again, albeit using a smaller text template for the time being.

Normal service should be resumed as soon as possible.

John

[John Smith]

Well, things are about back to normal.

It seems that the hacker was "just" a bot - an automatic program which created a user and then pretended to do things that only registered users can do.

There are/were a number of such "users" on the system, providing links to porn and internet drugstore sites. We obviously need to stop these criminals from abusing the forum in this way.

I'll investigate further different ways of blocking these bots, although it may prove to be a slight inconvenience to regular users when registering. I'll keep everyone informed...

John

[james mckinlay]

thanks for all your hard work on getting the group up and running again.

it cant be underestimated how much effort you put into this and i thank you for that.

keep up your excellent work and thanks again

james

[jayuk]

Just out of interest.....and you dont need to answer this...how much is it costing to host and run this board right now?......

[John Smith]

Thanks very much for the comments, James. Much appreciated. But it does have to be remembered that the KC group is not just this forum and website. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes, and there are other committee members who keep the cogs oiled.

I'm just the custodian of one of the group's front lines!

John

[GarethB]

John,

You are just like all the other comitee members; too modest.

You all do us a great service with what you do.

Regards

Gareth

[Sweet]

John,

Sorry to hear about problems with someone trying to hack into the site, or at least trying to download ads we don't need. My site uses Ezboard, and the same thing happened a few months back. We sadly lost a lot of posts from this year, and also some new members, as well as people losing faith in posting. Am hoping that everyone here sticks around!

Claire X x X