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You can etransfer to Henry Lam at chesstalkforum at gmail dot com
Transfér à Henry Lam à chesstalkforum@gmail.com
Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
Some Basics
1. Under Board "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQs) there are 3 sections dealing with General Forum Usage, User Profile Features, and Reading and Posting Messages. These deal with everything from Avatars to Your Notifications. Most general technical questions are covered there. Here is a link to the FAQs. https://forum.chesstalk.com/help
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3. If you've looked for an answer to a question, and not found one, then you should consider asking your question in a new thread. For example, there have already been questions and discussion regarding: how to do chess diagrams (FENs); crosstables that line up properly; and the numerous little “glitches” that every new site will have.
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Debate
9. Give an opinion and back it up with a reason. Throwaway comments such as "Game X pwnz because my friend and I think so!" could be considered pointless at best, and inflammatory at worst.
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Helping to Moderate
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Advice for free
14. You should exercise the same caution with Private Messages as you would with any public posting.
As you may know, ChessTalk has been down since Saturday. We notified the company...Lunarpages on Sunday morning that there was a problem...and it took until today for them to finally install a back-up.
I am not sure what is happening but I feel like the hackers are ahead of the curve. On Monday of this week, they hacked into our Bank accounts. Banks don't call it hacking...they say..."your account has been compromised"...it sounds better :).
At least we are back up and operational...for now :)
As you may know, ChessTalk has been down since Saturday. We notified the company...Lunarpages on Sunday morning that there was a problem...and it took until today for them to finally install a back-up.
I am not sure what is happening but I feel like the hackers are ahead of the curve. On Monday of this week, they hacked into our Bank accounts. Banks don't call it hacking...they say..."your account has been compromised"...it sounds better :).
At least we are back up and operational...for now :)
Larry
Seems that you should look for a better hosting company. If it took Lunarpages THAT long to install a backup then you definitely need to find a hosting company that knows what they are doing...
Bigger question is: 'what caused the outage?' and the follow-up: 'what are you doing to prevent that from happening again?'. Restoring a backup will get the site up and running again but unless you find and fix the problem it will simply happen over and over. Perhaps the version of vBulletin you are using is outdated or unpatched or otherwise vulnerable to hackers.
I realize you are running ChessTalk as a service to the chess community (and Thanks for that by the way!) but there may be some non-trivial costs associated with making this run correctly. Good luck with all that (and I realize running software on servers is not anywhere near your core business... it just seems like it is part of the whole operation, much like having corporate taxes done, accounting and bookkeeping etc.
The problem you experienced is a well known problem with Vbulletin software that is being used for these forums. Basically what happened is that Vbulletin has a security flaw where malware exists that allows one to register as an admin and then destroy the site. It appears to me that VBulletin's configuration files on your site were destroyed and Lunar probably had to reinstall Vbulletin.
Whoever did it knew what they were doing and I would guess that you just experienced a State sponsored attack.It is not a coincidence that your bank accounts were also hacked.
You should be looking at new registrations on the forum and deleting any new registrations that show a admin privileges. Vbulletin has not issued a patch for this flaw yet.
You should be contacting the authorities. The Canadian government has a team devoted to cyber crimes.
As you may know, ChessTalk has been down since Saturday. We notified the company...Lunarpages on Sunday morning that there was a problem...and it took until today for them to finally install a back-up.
I am not sure what is happening but I feel like the hackers are ahead of the curve. On Monday of this week, they hacked into our Bank accounts. Banks don't call it hacking...they say..."your account has been compromised"...it sounds better :).
At least we are back up and operational...for now :)
Larry
Last edited by Sid Belzberg; Wednesday, 4th June, 2014, 02:57 PM.
The problem you experienced is a well known problem with Vbulletin software that is being used for these forums. Basically what happened is that Vbulletin has a security flaw where malware exists that allows one to register as an admin and then destroy the site. It appears to me that VBulletin's configuration files on your site were destroyed and Lunar probably had to reinstall Vbulletin.
Whoever did it knew what they were doing and I would guess that you just experienced a State sponsored attack.It is not a coincidence that your bank accounts were also hacked.
You should be looking at new registrations on the forum and deleting any new registrations that show a admin privileges. Vbulletin has not issued a patch for this flaw yet.
You should be contacting the authorities. The Canadian government has a team devoted to cyber crimes.
The last time I looked, this site still had at least one ADMIN account that was a 'bot. And Lord knows how many run-of-the-mill 'bot accounts.
The last time I looked, this site still had at least one ADMIN account that was a 'bot. And Lord knows how many run-of-the-mill 'bot accounts.
Steve
The admin 'bot is gone (for now). You're right about the run-of-the-mill 'bots, however. And even as (English language) moderator I can't do a thing about obvious 'bots on the French side or 'bot postings on the blog feature here. The CFC has made a few improvements that might be worth copying (hint, hint).
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
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