Forum today - bad news

[Administrator]

Today (or possibly yesterday) the forum suffered an attack or some sort of corruption (maybe as a result of an attack). Suffice to say this morning the forum was unusable.

So I had to perform a restore. This went back to the last restore point which was as few weeks ago. So at that point we had a working forums but had lost a bit of content.  I have since been in touch with the ISP and they have been great and managed to perform a more recent restore (Feb 20, 2017 9:14:53 PM)....  so we have only lost a couple of days of posts

SO apologies if you have posted in the lats couple of days and lost it! but things were looking a lot worse at 8am this morning

If you did log on this morning you might have seen the site in various states of disorder - but I believe everything is now fixed

Props to a chap called Sean @ Terranetwork who helped us out this morning

[Mike Tanner]

Your forum down situation (corrupted database) is more likely to have been caused by a failing hard drive, memory chip, cables, etc. on your hosts server than by a cyber attack. Slapped wrist for lack of a more recent backup at your end, though  . Take my advice, back up the complete forum at least once a week via ftp. Don't just rely on quick database backups initiated from within the "Admin Control Panel" or whatever the equivalent is called with your forums software.

I don't want to sound like I am giving a lecture but quite often web hosting companies will ignore things like failing hard drives, etc. until it is too late and/or many of staff they have on the payroll are not at the level of expertise we customers would hope for.

[Stewart 46A]

Well done Simon, getting it sorted out

[Leslie BT]

Yep.
Well done Simon for all your efforts.

Hope you get the archive and backup routines automated soonest.

[pbeccas (Paul)]

Thanks Simon for getting it running again.  Be a sad loss if this excellent forum went away.

[Administrator]

I don't think that we were in any danger of going way  Generally the worst that can happen is you lose some days.

Just as a bit more back story. When we first set up we had a lot of interest from IP ranges from the former Soviet union area. These largely went away when we changed the registration method to answer Peter Pig specific questions. However, when we did the forum upgrade last month one of the fixes was a security patch, and it seemed to replace the verification questions with a captcha code verification which any 'real' person can get past.  Around the same time we had more interest again from Russia, but by and large as these IP ranges came along I banned them. The penny should have dropped that something had happened to make it easier for them to get access.

I can't tell who or what the final issue was - and it may have indeed been some less nefarious hardware upset

SO we are back to the old method of verification - the upgrade had just flicked the switch.

I have increased the frequency of back ups (and they are now rolling backup) - buy i'll have to keep an eye on on the space it takes up. But to be honest the ISP seem to have the ability to restore to a point in time that is better than anything the control backups can do. So looking at it as a positive it just a DR test - which worked out ok.

Fingers crossed thats to for a while

[Leslie BT]

Brilliant Simon, hope this does not happen again and dampen your enthusiasm.