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So like... Backups? Restore, put it behind basic auth and email the password to the members active in the past few weeks, then at your leasure implement some ca

by Aachen 6y ago

So like... Backups? Restore, put it behind basic auth and email the password to the members active in the past few weeks, then at your leasure implement some captchas and go from there. Heck, restore the forum publicly as well and use that as a sandbox to see how they'll bypass it.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Shirley, you jest. Backups are for, like, squares, dude. We live on the edge, dude! Extreme! YOLO! In all fairness, the person involved was a truly brilliant young man, and the experience pretty much shattered him, emotionally. He has yet to recover from it. In a way, it can be satisfying to be able to say "I told you so," but seeing the human cost kinda takes the fun out of smugness.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  How did the spammers hit back? Can I ask what made it hard / infeasible to continue once the spammers had stopped hitting back? > seeing the human cost It seems the forum meant a lot to him/her
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I was not directly involved in the incident; hearing about it after the fact. My understanding is that a forum spammer started registering fake accounts, and then did what they do. The admin saw this. He was quite smart, and figured out who they were, then executed some kind of attack on their server. I think it was a DDoS attack. When they responded, the used a bunch of privilege escalation attacks to promote some of their registered users (It was a badly-maintained phpBB site; otherwise known as "Swiss Cheese"), and blew away a lot of the site structure and templates, so it basically imploded. Yeah, it was his "baby." He was also involved in a running battle of nerd egos with some other folks, who used the incident to discredit him, and drove him out.
    - cutemonster 6y ago
      > blew away a lot of the site structure and templates Crazy spammers who have time for such things Sad to hear how this affected him
parliament32 6y ago
He said DDoS which has nothing to do with the data itself, and auth/captcha won't help. You'll have to upgrade to beefier servers, fatter pipes, or pay for a reverse proxy.. CF is free now and kinda helps sometimes, but it wasn't in the past, and any hacker with a grudge can take down your site anyway. It's about forcing you to spend money; which, if you're a hobby site forum host, you probably don't have.
- Aachen 6y ago
  Ah, right, I read it differently but I think you're right. In my initial understanding the spammers hit back by a huge spam wave, but a counter DDoS could also be.

by Aachen 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Shirley, you jest. Backups are for, like, squares, dude. We live on the edge, dude! Extreme! YOLO! In all fairness, the person involved was a truly brilliant young man, and the experience pretty much shattered him, emotionally. He has yet to recover from it. In a way, it can be satisfying to be able to say "I told you so," but seeing the human cost kinda takes the fun out of smugness.

cutemonster 6y ago
How did the spammers hit back? Can I ask what made it hard / infeasible to continue once the spammers had stopped hitting back? > seeing the human cost It seems the forum meant a lot to him/her
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I was not directly involved in the incident; hearing about it after the fact. My understanding is that a forum spammer started registering fake accounts, and then did what they do. The admin saw this. He was quite smart, and figured out who they were, then executed some kind of attack on their server. I think it was a DDoS attack. When they responded, the used a bunch of privilege escalation attacks to promote some of their registered users (It was a badly-maintained phpBB site; otherwise known as "Swiss Cheese"), and blew away a lot of the site structure and templates, so it basically imploded. Yeah, it was his "baby." He was also involved in a running battle of nerd egos with some other folks, who used the incident to discredit him, and drove him out.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    > blew away a lot of the site structure and templates Crazy spammers who have time for such things Sad to hear how this affected him

parliament32 6y ago

He said DDoS which has nothing to do with the data itself, and auth/captcha won't help. You'll have to upgrade to beefier servers, fatter pipes, or pay for a reverse proxy.. CF is free now and kinda helps sometimes, but it wasn't in the past, and any hacker with a grudge can take down your site anyway. It's about forcing you to spend money; which, if you're a hobby site forum host, you probably don't have.

Aachen 6y ago
Ah, right, I read it differently but I think you're right. In my initial understanding the spammers hit back by a huge spam wave, but a counter DDoS could also be.