Battletech refugees unite!

[Weirdo]

Welcome, all those displaced by the loss of the CBT.com forums! Enjoy your stay in the land where the battleships retain their rightful prominence!

[Arthinas]

Glad to see I'm not the only refugee from the Battletech forums!

[ThreeGees]

Where are the tents? The cots? The free donuts and coffee? The bikini-clad UN volunteeres?

[Istal Devalis]

The catgirls?

[Weirdo]

Where are the tents? The cots? The free donuts and coffee? The bikini-clad UN volunteeres?

Sorry, but the Leviathans timeline currently predates both the UN and bikinis.

...what did the sexy extragovernmental volunteer women wear in 1910, anyway?

[Leaderoforcs]

Entirely too much. 

Anyway, are they wiping EVERYTHING, or just not necessarily reinstating profiles and histories and stuff?

[Van Gogh]

Clothes aren't relevant, we've got Sarah Bernhardt ! And Mucha's models. And Can-Can dancers...

Anyway, are they wiping EVERYTHING, or just not necessarily reinstating profiles and histories and stuff?

Looks like it's a total nuking of poster profiles. We may have archives, but we will have to recreate our profiles... I'm awaiting Deathshadow's report on what kind of attack reached this result; should be interesting.

[ColBosch]

I'm really hoping the Errata threads will be recoverable. *makes a very grim face*

[Leaderoforcs]

But... but.... Wombat.   

What about that mega post count?

[pianobar]

We'll have to see how things are once it all settles, really. I was on OK momentarily and was able to see various people that had been turned into Guests (namely Deathshadow & Wombat), but then everything went down. Post counts are one thing, the errata and related CGL/BT information threads are what I'm afraid of losing or not being able to reliably search through.

[ColBosch]

Much as I am concerned for my little corner of the internets, even if we lose the entire errata section I trust in the BattleTech fans to help us though this rough period. With the barest of exceptions you folks have helped more than I ever expected, and we all appreciate it.

We will be back, and we'll be stronger than ever.

[Deathrider6]

I enjoy the quiet here...seriously but I do miss CBT hope DS fixes them soon.

[Worktroll]

And, hot from the trenches (at least, only slightly lukewarm):

Well, here's where we're at and the current battleplan.

It appears that we may have had TWO hacks occur near simultaneously or with overlap -- a nasty fast one atop a slow/insidious one.

The nasty fast one somehow got itself elevated to admin rights and started deleting users MANUALLY and running mySQL commands to delete post indexes from the database -- and we're not talking indexes that can be rebuilt either. Since they appear to have had access to admin rights I cannot/will not trust any of the existing user accounts that were on it. It's odd though as they used a certain admin password without it showing up as being logged in for that user -- so I think they found a security flaw or had a backdoor installed from that previous failed hacking attempt back in July. (that I thought I cleaned out)... either that or the TWO DAYS since SMF 1.1.13 was released documented a new doorway. (and I was going to upgrade tomorrow too...). Maybe a four day upgrade gap was too wide?

The slow/insidious one appears to have been modifying forum .php files in the background slowly and quietly that I THINK was a failed attack circa late October, and that up and decided to start running when the 'fast one' started playing around with it.

It is unclear whether these were two separate attacks, or a slowly and well planned escalation over several months... Going through the monthly backups I am unwilling to trust the Jan, Dec or Nov backups as they all seem to have a slow corruption and bits and pieces of various hacking attempts in them. SO...

I'm with Ripley...

To try and turn this into a positive I'm going to take this 'nuke it from orbit' moment to move us to SMF 2.0 even if it is only at release candidate status -- I was going to wait for final but if we're going to start over, I'd like to do so on the next-gen.

It is going to take me a few days to get it to where I'm happy with the new security settings I'll be putting in place (things actually COULD have been worse!!! Lord help us if the main site had been running turdpress or boomla) at which point I'm gonna have the admins and mods go in and dot every t and cross every i on getting the correct forums and settings into place. We're also going to take this opportunity to review the rules and who's responsible for what.

We probably will NOT have a new forums up and running for the public until sometime after monday. I apologize for the delay but the old forum was starting to rot and was hack upon hack upon upgrade upon upgrade -- and like anything else after three years of use it needed a spring cleaning anyways. (TRYING to look at the bright side here!)

I'll try to keep you posted here as to where I'm at with this.

Oh, and if you know who's at ###.###.###.### (that's a german IP), do me a favor and shove your boot straight up their backside. I should have listened to George -- I put up one of the biggest static fortifications possible on a server; and it ended up a Maginot line. Leave it to some German to goose-step through Belgium on me.

Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.

(notes we're already on SMF 2.0 RC2 ...)

Worktroll

[Drop Bear]

And to think I had three long posts ready to hit send on just as the admins took the sight down. and as of tonight I've got some more B-Tech stuff and some other stuff to add to Off Topic threads I was part of.

[pianobar]

And, hot from the trenches (at least, only slightly lukewarm):

Thanks for the public update, Worktroll.