Forum Backup Restored


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daft27

daft27

-nya
Retired
A moderator account has been compromised from "United States - Texas - Ft. Worth - University Of North Texas" (129.120.103.223). Backups of posts and topics dating up to May 29th have been restored.

As a result, the University of North Texas may be banned indefinitely from accessing this site. If you feel that this is unfair, blame the individual who was responsible for erasing the forums.
 
Got a question....
don't really understand what just happened, but anyway, some threads are gone and i was just wondering if it will come back later, or should we just re-make those threads?

(didn't know where to ask this question else
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)
 
Most of the new threads were wiped out. You should probably first use the search feature to make sure it's not just hiding somewhere and re-make those threads that are missing and you would like to continue discussing.
 
What they did was really lame and inexcusable. It is hard to imaging someone doing something malicious to a great site like this. I guess it is safe to say they prolly are not fans of anime.

Since you have the IP, I hope your working with the school where it originated to try and find out who did this. The person most likely didn't do it from their computer using their own account but you never know, they could just be that stupid.

Also, I hope no personal information about the membership was compromised.

Nice recovery though as I'm sure it could have been much worse.
 
QUOTE (jwill7g9 @ Jun 7 2006, 10:32 AM) Nice recovery though as I'm sure it could have been much worse.
Yes, when animesuki was hacked a while back they lost basically a whole year's worth of forum posts and also all the user accounts as they didn't have any recent backups that worked (maybe the backups got deleted with the main site, I don't recall now). It looks like Daft is backing up fansub.tv weekly so not much got lost. I'm kicking myself for not keeping copies of some of my recent posts though: I composed a couple offline but deleted the text file after posting them last night..... arghhhh!!

The other thing I would note that is if moderators have the power to delete whole swathes of stuff then a strong password policy needs to be enforced for such users (I don't know how the attack was done, but I can imagine it might have been something like a dictionary attack against the moderator accounts).

If people have any of the forums in their browser cache they could retrieve and repost stuff... another tactic that animesuki did was to get stuff from the google cache before it was lost, but I just did a google search and it seems to be too late - I can't find any cached posts beyond May31st so they must have already updated their cache, damn.
 
heh heh I'm going to double post here

OK here's how to get some of your old posts back!

It turns out Yahoo still have some of the last week's posts in cache!
Goto http://search.yahoo.com/search/options

Under "all of these words" put your username and the word jun (to match stuff dated June. NB it's written "jun" not "june"!).

Under "Updated" choose last three months

Under "site/domain" click radio button and enter boards.fansub.tv

You should get a bunch of hits. Click the "Cache" option for each (I opened them all in new tabs with Opera, Firefox can do the same). Some of the cached versions are wrong or unavailable but you should get at least some of your posts shown so that you can copy and repost them to the appropriate thread.

To repost images whose URLs you've forgotten right click on the image and choose "copy image address/location".

Maybe Daft could wrie a perl script to parse the cached forum pages and turn them back into real messages in the database? I wonder if animesuki made such a script that they could lend us?
 
personally, i don't think that getting the old posts is that important.. it would take too much time to make something like that work, and that time is much more important to get a better backup system working.. besides, when that was working, most of the people wouldn't care about old posts anyway
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so, the important things here are:

- if you are a mod, please be sure to use a strong password (words that can be found on a dictionary are a bad, baaaad idea, for example) and make sure to login from secure computers -- if you're having nasty spyware problems, the possibility that someone's getting your passwords is a lot higher.

- daft will try to make backups more frequently, so that if things like this happen again, only 1 or 2 days of posts are lost;

- if you are a regular member, all you have to do is start posting again to make things get back to normal as soon as possible
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so let's just continue doing what we always did!

(this is a personal opinion, i'm not representing the staff!!)
 
that really sux what happened
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ive had experiences with a hacker, (hacker-stalker actualy) atleast not alot of info was lost.

@cool tip Hiroyuki-san, i looked and only 1 of my lost posts were of relevance. thanks.
 
Wow what an ass!! Ban him on the spot, things like this just CAN'T be tolerated! Really, you should ban him!
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It should also be a lesson for other people who want to try the same thing.
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But still, it's not up to me (too bad, lol) and Daft you did a real good job backing the forum up.
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Thank you thank you thank you thank you
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QUOTE (darkdog @ Jun 7 2006, 05:43 PM) - if you are a mod, please be sure to use a strong password (words that can be found on a dictionary are a bad, baaaad idea, for example) and make sure to login from secure computers -- if you're having nasty spyware problems, the possibility that someone's getting your passwords is a lot higher.
Also it would be a good idea that the "remember me" option when loggin would NOT be selected by default. (At least for mods) I know there were a few times where I forgot to un-check it on computer at school. Considering cookies are stored on my private account, its not such a problem in this particular case, but many people share accounts on computers. So changing the default would be a good idea.
 
and one more thing: don't let computers automatically save your password. they will prompt you on this. Instead, always keep that off. allow your browser (morzilla firefox is preferred) to save your password. it'a fairly safer than having the site save your IP.
 
QUOTE (hamasusuke @ Jun 8 2006, 07:26 PM) it'a fairly safer than having the site save your IP.
The sites NEVER stores your IP to allow you to log back in. What happens is that there is a file (called a cookie) the sites stores on your computer (locally on your harddrive). This cookie is the way the site will "automaticly" log you back in next time.

So basicly using the browser passwords feature or the site's built in way is preatty much equivalent.
 
Moderator account being compromised? Hopefully that wasn't someone just guessing random sequences. Anyhow on an ending note: Good passwords are letters, numbers, and multiple cases. eg p4ssW0rD
 
FTV isn't hacked often.. as far as i know, the forum issue was the first time that it was hacked!

most of the other problems are due to flaws in software, server problems and other things that aren't caused by hackers. the lack of pictures right now, for example, is probably caused by a malfunctioning server.. it'll be fixed as soon as daft has the time to do so!
 
I don't know if this is supposed to be a new front page feature or something caused by the hacking but I'm finding the fansub.tv homepage now always prominently displays what seems to be a forum message titled "help with my ddl" from someone saying they can't get the downloads to work. It's been like this for a couple of days now I think.
If it's a new feature it doesn't make for a very good ad. for this site!
 
according to what we know, that's neither a feature nor a consequence of hacking -- i think it's just a bug! if it was a hacker it would be something completely different, in my opinion.. the text in the front page is from a post on these boards.

it'll surely be fixed as soon as daft is back!
 
o so that`s why i`m getting red crosses , i was starting to think it was sponoring by the red cross o.o
 
Ah, finally, those little envelopes I used to see are back again ^^
After the hack, the smilies and envelopes just vanished. And it took a long long time to load this page T_T I'm glad it's back to normal again
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