Hacked! (Or "Why I Hate People")

[Databits]

There is a shield.... it's called take the server offline.

Other than that, isn't much you can do other than be very carefull on security detail.

[shadow-alchemist]

*shivers* This reminds me of when I used to be a PHP programmer...I hated and still hate hackers. I remembering doing all that wonderful verification with numbers and letters just to check for a real person at some point, which is really the best that I could do against a program trying to get in. That worked for programs, but not so much real people. Real people are trickier to deal with.

(Makes me almost glad I stopped programming. Almost.)

[Xepher]

First off... don't panic! Nothing too bad/dangerous, just an explanation for why everything was slow/down for part of today (10/31.) The entire data center became the target of a massive DoS attack. Seems to have basically been a ping flood, as (when I could actually get into the server) I shut down every service, which should mean NO network traffic at all, yet the card was still getting over a megabit every second. Then I lost even my extremely slow connection. When it came back up, the server no longer responded to pings, but everything else worked fine. I think they're blocking all pings to the datacenter right now to fend off this attack.

People should be beaten with a dull spoon.

[Databits]

or a solidified jello rod

[dragyn]

Hmmm...So here got hacked too, then?  Looks like several webcomic hosring sites (basically the only ones I ever bother keeping up with) have been hacked this month.  At least, several of the ones I've visited have mentioned something like this.  

Weird...

[Databits]

I never fully understood why people do crap like that. It gives up programmers a bad name.

[Xepher]

Oh yay... another hack! Server was down for about 3 hours. Malacious javascript was added to all index files that was designed to infect windows machines with viruses and spyware. The added code opened a tiny iframe that loaded another site. I ran a script that searched for the added string and removed it from all pages. It should be completely clean, but if you encounter any virus warnings or other "odd" behavior from a xepher.net site, please let me know. The original exploit was a bug in OpenSSL, the supposedly "SECURE socket layer" library. I find it ironic that all the major hacks I've seen recently have all been in security software, like the virus scanner and such.

I hate people.

[maniac_wolfman]

Hmmm, well I guess as long as you caught it in time it's all good.

Phew, I had been uploading some files...then when I went to check on the results the site was down....

For a few seconds there I was like "I....broke Xepher....."

[Xepher]

Heheh... No, you didn't, but someone else sure gave it a good try.

[griever]

Man, people...today just seems to be the day when I learn (more) about how horrible the human race is.  Thanks for fixing it so quickly, Xepher.

[Databits]

There are people out there that are truely stupid, simple as that.

[Xepher]

I'm a moron... as I tracked down more hacking, I seem to have killed the webserver, and then I went to bed (it was 6am) without checking it. It was off the whole time I slept. My bad.

[reinder]

Ha! That just proves that it happens to the best of us.

[Databits]

Meh, nobody is perfect Xeph.