Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Chalenge on May 13, 2009, 02:10:08 PM
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Terrabytes of data have been lost and the forums destroyed at avsim. Its a shame that the administrator never had the funds to properly protect the data but whats done is done. Whoever did this better not ever open his mouth to brag about it.
:mad:
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what is avsim?
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Wow. That's unbelievable. :(
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One May 12th, AVSIM was attacked by a hacker which subsequently brought the entire website down. Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, issued the following announcement after AVSIM went offline.
“We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks….”.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avsim.com
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Just to update the information I was given is partially in error. Funds were not the problem as much as the approach to backups which was server-server rather than any form of external backup or imaging and so when the server partitions were eliminated all the data was gone. Hopefully a technical person can restore portions of it once the onsite inspection is done. The forum membership was in excess of 60000 people with possibly ten times that number accessing files worldwide so this obviously hits a large and faithful audience pretty hard.
Its not just flight simulator but x-plane too.
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More low class scum rears it's ugly head.
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That's not good. I have downloaded several planes from them. Can't believe someone would do something like that. Hope they can recover at least some of the data!
-Zap
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Someone has been going out of their way to attack servers.
A very large Catfishing message board got nailed some 3 weeks ago.
Wiping out any members who had joined in the last 2+ years.
Ended up forcing them to spend money to migrate to a new server, with several expensive backup tools.
Wonder what they'll hit next.
BTW Catfish1 not a small site.
Threads: 95,673, Posts: 1,295,243, Members: 28,072
http://www.catfish1.com (http://www.catfish1.com)
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Someone has been going out of their way to attack servers.
A very large Catfishing message board got nailed some 3 weeks ago.
Wiping out any members who had joined in the last 2+ years.
Ended up forcing them to spend money to migrate to a new server, with several expensive backup tools.
Wonder what they'll hit next.
BTW Catfish1 not a small site.
Threads: 95,673, Posts: 1,295,243, Members: 28,072
http://www.catfish1.com (http://www.catfish1.com)
hopefully not here
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hopefully not here
Nah, if they do, well... we'll get the pitchforks and a nice steak...err... stake. :t
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I am sure Skuzzy sleeps with the nightly backup tape under his pillow every night. Nothing to worry about. :D
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Are you telling me that with 60k+ accounts.. nobody could be bothered to a burn a copy of the database to DVD?
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That sucks. I really enjoy AVSIM. :(
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Well the good news is that once word got out users started to donate and within 24 hours donations exceeded all donations that had been received over AVSIMs 12 years history so Im pretty sure they will be back better than ever. All of the files on avsim are replaceable but it will take time unless the IT experts can recover the HDs with their data intact.
This is a pretty big story still in progress:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8049780.stm
The BBC report is based largely on the initial reaction of Allensworth who has changed his tune very much since that information went out.
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Are you telling me that with 60k+ accounts.. nobody could be bothered to a burn a copy of the database to DVD?
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That sucks. I really enjoy AVSIM. :(
How many DVDs do you think that would take?
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At $80 U.S. per 500GB of disk space, you slap together an external server whose only task is to backup the replicated database. Oh, that assumes you are running with replication in the SQL server enabled. You want to use the replicated database to prevent excess locking which would occur on a live database.
Any non-SQL files are just dumped off over the network to the backup server using whatever you want to use.
You put that server on a private internal network, behind a proper firewall, and that should take care of the problem. You might lose some data if the live server gets destoyed, but you will not lose all of it. Timewise, you might be down for a few hours.
Then if you want to place the data in a remote location, you do a dump to DVD once every two or three days.
Stuff like this is easy to do. No reason not to be able to do it. It is cheap. You can build a decent firewall from a cheap Intel box, as well as a fileserver. None of that requires a state of the art system.
Hindsight....one thing you learn early as being an admin, you do not have the luxury of hindsight.
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Hindsight....one thing you learn early as being an admin, you do not have the luxury of hindsight.
QFT^^^
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Someone has been going out of their way to attack servers.
A very large Catfishing message board got nailed some 3 weeks ago.
Wiping out any members who had joined in the last 2+ years.
Ended up forcing them to spend money to migrate to a new server, with several expensive backup tools.
Wonder what they'll hit next.
BTW Catfish1 not a small site.
Threads: 95,673, Posts: 1,295,243, Members: 28,072
http://www.catfish1.com (http://www.catfish1.com)
LOL do you realize how many servers are hacked daily? :)
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No amount of information is truly destroyed; there will always be something/someone with the information stored away somewhere. Just like in Fahrenheit 451.
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LOL do you realize how many servers are hacked daily? :)
no but this seems to be happening once a month to the flightsim community. If i had money, id bet that is was the same guy that hacked vatsim a month ago and screwed everything up and they still haven't got every thing back to normal.
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no but this seems to be happening once a month to the flightsim community. If i had money, id bet that is was the same guy that hacked vatsim a month ago and screwed everything up and they still haven't got every thing back to normal.
http://zone-h.org/
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For all you flight sim nuts ... I'm gunna guess there are a few in here ... some aholes did a number on the Avsim site. :mad: :furious And apparently, the backups were trashed, too. The site was a great source for links, FYI's, how-tos, etc.
The hackers need a ball peen hammer to the knuckles ... and maybe some other important body parts. :eek:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/15/0138204&from=rss
Edit: Sorry, I see this info had already been posted
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Already posted. Still quite annoying to hear about these pesky Server crackers.
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,264752.0.html
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Avsim will be back