If your forums have been attacked before, what was the worst instance and what did you have to do to recover? Most importantly, what did you learn from this?

The worst one by far for me was probably 8 or so months ago when somebody used an exploit in IPB to gain access to an administrator's account. They then deleted forums, deleted admin accounts, and turned the forums offline - leaving a nasty message up there. Before they got too far (if that wasn't already far enough), a fellow admin of mine (who is actually here at AF - LarryB) thought to disrupt the connection between the forums and the database. If the forums cannot communicate with the database, there is nothing the hackers can do through the ACP. What he did was remove the database username from the config file, and voila - Database error! Yahoo!!

The recovery was nasty. We had to restore a backup which was like a week old, if I remember correctly. I dont remember whether or not anything they did affected the files themselves, I'm pretty sure it did not.

Moral of the story: Always make daily backups and try to have an admin always monitoring the forums

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Which is why you should have moderators who are in different timezones. Just to help out

by the way, Can a VBulletin forum be hacked too?....I'm starting to worry

Jazzz

Can a vBulletin forum be hacked? Most certainly, anything can be hacked if somebody knows what they are doing. Should you be worried? No, I wouldn't be. Both vB and IPB are extremely secure, and when holes are found, they are patched almost immediately. That said, if you haven't already, you should upgrade to the latest version of vB - 3.5.2...because there have been vulnerabilities found in 3.5.1. If you don't want to upgrade completely, there is a very easy patch process. You can find out more about all of that here - [vB News] vBulletin 3.5.2 Released

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hmm....Thanks for the info...will thinnk abt it

Jazzz

No software is 100% bug-free so there is always the possibility of something unexpected. Also keep in mind that they don't need to attack your forum software to get into your server.. especially if your server is not properly maintained and secured.

altho i been lucky so far, i do know a site that has been "hacked" if you would like to call it that, What happened was the owner was getting his puter re-formatted (there for no backups) and one if the admins that didn\'t like him deleted a lot of members, posts, ECT.... but he had good members and thay most rejoined. (lol kinda of a good ending)

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Corrupt Admins.....scary stuff. Be careful who you hire, that's for sure

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I just hope this doesn't happen to me I don't want to lose my 300 posts lol ) I want to switch to vBulletin once I get the money to buy a licence which is very very soon

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My Planet: Planet Diaz

othings happend to my forums *hits wood* lol


i just backed up my forum

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Will Stumpf - TalkNikon
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