HaJ website host hacked *sigh*Sun, October 8th, 2006 @ 19:54
As if my month couldn’t get any worse…
About an hour ago (as of time of this post) the hosting company where the Ham and Jam website and forums are held has been “hacked” by what appears to be a group protesting about the US involvement in the Middle East. The irritating thing is that I had just decided to sit down and back-up the server in preparation for a move to a non-US host when this happened.
The first problem was a 500 server error followed by the actual website itself not responding to requests. I figured that if I it was a config error with the server I should still be able to get in via the control panel and FTP to do the back-up. It was when I logged into cPanel that I got the actual hackers message itself.
More than likely they got in through the recently announced cPanel security hole which is scary because the same whole is being used to inject code into sites to deliver worms via Internet Explorer to unsuspecting users.
At the moment I can’t say when the Ham and Jam site will be back up and running but it’s certainly pushed forward moving things to a new host. I just hope I can recover the files from the server and more importantly the database dump.
This doesn’t affect Ham and Jam development as all content is kept elsewhere, however it does mean effort has to be redirected to fixing this problem rather than working on the game as the forums were a key method of co-ordinating the team.
UPDATE: Gaah! They’ve done what I hoped they wouldn’t - they’ve progressively drilled down all the sites hosted by the company and replaced the index files with their message. This now means our homepage and forums are displaying their crap.
UPDATE 2: Well I seem to of removed their crap from our site but our admin panel is still hosed. :o(
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Adios Amigo…Sun, October 8th, 2006 @ 19:18
We got some bad news over at the Day of Defeat Forums a couple of days ago. One of our moderators, Christopher “Tekkobra” Mckinzie apparently died after a weapon related accident. At the time of writing we still don’t have any firm details of what happened exactly except that it was a weapon, assumed firearm and that he sustained fatal chest injuries.
Chris was a financial advisor in Texas and was just about to make the big step of starting his own firm. He had a fiancee Claudine and two children. Sadly, I have to admit that’s all I knew of him and apart from the usual banter we exchanged in the forums we never knew each other outside of them. He was a good moderator, kept the trouble makers in order and contributed to the forums a great deal both in topics and debate and that’s how I’ll remember him most.
It was something that Tim, another moderator, said in relation to this that really stuck with me this week:
“It really puts some things in perspective - seeing more that everyone here is a real person with real lives (and sorrows), not just some nickname and sig on a forum.”
Here’s to you Chris…
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