Greetings.
When I was young, my mother told me that I should be happy for small things - that "daily life" alone is a wonderful thing. So - the mere fact that you are reading this message is good - be happy.
Last week, on September 10th, 2013, the EY.o site was hacked into by individuals from Russia - and then subjected to a DoS attack for hours afterward. The hacking went sequentially through the website, and defaced ALL posts, blogs, settings, source files, etc - and filled them with random obscenities, etc. This is not my first hacking (remember the jihadists in 2003 or 2004?) - but when it happens it's a bit like having your house broken into - and you go crazy locking things down and trying to prevent additional loss, etc. I was up until nearly 2 am shutting things down - it was not pleasant.
But - over the course of this weekend, the only real damage to the database that I found - that which basically kills it for us - is the degree of completeness in the changes to the database. Not only the content of the threads - but also to the settings, the forum settings, etc. Basically the entire db was trashed - but not the site itself. At the beginning, I was also concerned that perhaps the email addresses had been compromised - but to date it seems that no one has been spammed or has there been other evidence that they were indeed pulled from the database. If you have reason to believe differently, please let me know.
But as you know - there are costs for everything in life. The cost here is obvious (I'm guessing you've noticed already): We've lost all the data between Jan 28th and Sept 10th. Why? Because I finished my grad program just over a year ago, and in January I was in the process of multiple job interviews and then getting hired by my present employer. So, when I re-entered the workforce, I pretty much lost sight of everything else (we men only have single processors mind you... :nerd: ) - and since things were running smoothly and we had not had any problems, I failed to keep up with the backups, etc.
For this oversight - I apologize - to all of you. It won't happen again - ever - for any reason; I have instituted a series of regular backups (which I won't describe here - but they will be regular and complete).
What can you do to help? One word: POST.
I am asking everyone to please post a thread that you may have posted this year about whatever particular topics - for the bloggers to post their blogs again and for everyone to generally fill in this huge hole left by the hackers maliciousness and my inattention.
If you registered and created an account after Jan 28th, you'll need to go back and re-register. I've switched the registration over again for security - but I'll be watching my phone and will approve requests as soon as I see them. I have a copy of the trashed db - so I can look things up - but basically it's unfit for human consumption.
Again - I'm sorry for the hassle -- but basically the world has returned to Jan 28th on EY.o -- eventually things will calm down and return to normal. Really.
I'll post more later on in another thread. Please feel free to rant any anger about the loss of data directly to me - either here, or via email.
Thanks,
//sse
When I was young, my mother told me that I should be happy for small things - that "daily life" alone is a wonderful thing. So - the mere fact that you are reading this message is good - be happy.
Last week, on September 10th, 2013, the EY.o site was hacked into by individuals from Russia - and then subjected to a DoS attack for hours afterward. The hacking went sequentially through the website, and defaced ALL posts, blogs, settings, source files, etc - and filled them with random obscenities, etc. This is not my first hacking (remember the jihadists in 2003 or 2004?) - but when it happens it's a bit like having your house broken into - and you go crazy locking things down and trying to prevent additional loss, etc. I was up until nearly 2 am shutting things down - it was not pleasant.
But - over the course of this weekend, the only real damage to the database that I found - that which basically kills it for us - is the degree of completeness in the changes to the database. Not only the content of the threads - but also to the settings, the forum settings, etc. Basically the entire db was trashed - but not the site itself. At the beginning, I was also concerned that perhaps the email addresses had been compromised - but to date it seems that no one has been spammed or has there been other evidence that they were indeed pulled from the database. If you have reason to believe differently, please let me know.
But as you know - there are costs for everything in life. The cost here is obvious (I'm guessing you've noticed already): We've lost all the data between Jan 28th and Sept 10th. Why? Because I finished my grad program just over a year ago, and in January I was in the process of multiple job interviews and then getting hired by my present employer. So, when I re-entered the workforce, I pretty much lost sight of everything else (we men only have single processors mind you... :nerd: ) - and since things were running smoothly and we had not had any problems, I failed to keep up with the backups, etc.
For this oversight - I apologize - to all of you. It won't happen again - ever - for any reason; I have instituted a series of regular backups (which I won't describe here - but they will be regular and complete).
What can you do to help? One word: POST.
I am asking everyone to please post a thread that you may have posted this year about whatever particular topics - for the bloggers to post their blogs again and for everyone to generally fill in this huge hole left by the hackers maliciousness and my inattention.
If you registered and created an account after Jan 28th, you'll need to go back and re-register. I've switched the registration over again for security - but I'll be watching my phone and will approve requests as soon as I see them. I have a copy of the trashed db - so I can look things up - but basically it's unfit for human consumption.
Again - I'm sorry for the hassle -- but basically the world has returned to Jan 28th on EY.o -- eventually things will calm down and return to normal. Really.
I'll post more later on in another thread. Please feel free to rant any anger about the loss of data directly to me - either here, or via email.
Thanks,
//sse
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