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The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 11:26 pm
by Aster
...Well? I'm surprised there's not a thread talking about it?

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 11:44 pm
by Craitman
Well, I've not heard anything from Spangle, so I'm as unknowing as everyone else!

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 1:23 am
by Edgard
Do we know what happened?

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 12:00 pm
by Craitman
Like I said, no :?

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 6:54 pm
by Benkern
Weird as hell. It was probably Tgaoth.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:08 am
by Orion
I heard from Ari that Spangle is pulling out of hosting things, and who knows what else.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 1:22 am
by ari
Aw, man, I was hoping I'd get to see a little bit more speculation :( (and so was Spangle)

Oh well, it was about time anyway. Yeah, the "hacker" was Spangle himself. You'll note that http://www.open-micronational.dr-spangle.com/ is also replaced with the same thing (and also comes with a backup of their forum and stuff, though unlike MCS/Hub I don't think I'll be hosting OpenMicronational myself - they are weird people who scare me a bit). Spangle also took the backups, which is why I was actually willing to put them on my webspace - I don't think I would have trusted a backup taken by an unknown person for unknown reasons!

I don't know yet when mnforumlist is going down but it'll probably be soon so he'll maximise the money he gets back from BlueHost.

FWIW BlueHost's major hosting space limits (that they only advertise in the TOS, not, say, in the list of features) are that you are limited to 200000 files (I have ~70000ish) and a combined 3GB of space used over all databases (I'm using slightly under half of that, I think). So I'm pretty sure I can take on mnforumlist without much trouble, but I'd like to be future-proof beyond that and not add on more stuff.

So, yeah. The MCS and MNHub are now hosted on my account, and Spangle isn't showing much interest in spending time on micronationalism anymore, so I suppose direct complaints about technical issues to me now. I've also got full control over the hub.mn domain (and have updated its whois). The micras.org domain is a little bit more difficult - it seems nobody has the credentials to the domainsbyproxy account for it. VC Vehendi might, but I don't know how to contact him.

Oh, and the Alexandrian site going down at nearly the same time was a coincidence. As was Interland's forum... I think? I don't even know where that's hosted...

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 4:18 am
by chrimigules
I was perfectly at ease with blaming Tgaoth.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 11:23 am
by pawelabrams
Interland is hosted on Polish servers now, so it's completely a coincidence. And it was server-(or domain-)wide, as forum.mikronacje.info and mikroslawia.mikronacje.info seemed not to work either.

If it was Spangle's way to say goodbye, he could choose a better one...

Nvm, all hail our new techie, Ari :P

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 1:33 pm
by Craitman
All glory to the hypno-Ari.
Image

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 3:05 pm
by ari
By the way, fun fact about that database size limit: It's pretty easy to blow past it by leaving a wiki open to public editing. Really. Spammers keep putting stuff on it, and the accretion can end up in the multi-gigabyte range after a couple of years. Spangle removed StorWiki because of spam like that, and I'm not sure he took a backup of it. The Library of Normark had the same problem, and the best solution I could come up with was copying all the useful content over manually and just deleting the old database. Maybe there would be some faster way to do it, for instance if most of the useful edits have been done by a very small group of users - on Normark pretty much all contributions were made from one account - but even then I have no idea about MediaWiki's database schema and of what it would take to actually get it done correctly, so it would probably have ended up being more work.

MicrasWiki already requires a hub.mn login for editing so it'll be fine (remind me to improve the messages to actually indicate that it's hub.mn - currently it doesn't say anything more specific than phpBB). Same with ShireWiki and now the Library of Normark, and that covers the wikis I'm currently hosting (if it doesn't, I'm a bit more forgetful than I thought). But I thought it would be a good idea to warn people that spam on wikis can turn out to be a problem even if it isn't visible, just by taking up space.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 4:29 pm
by Edgard
Ah, well, that is quite interesting. I am glad to see that things have gotten taken care of, but I.would have liked some form of general notification and we could have worked as a hobby together to get this up and running! At least we are good for now. I am hosting stuff on my webspace as well, I am with Globat.com. I would love to help you, Ari, in any way I can. Please let me know!

If anyone is interested in getting stuff hosted, you can contact me via PM, email or on http://www.mncommunities.org.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 10:12 am
by pawelabrams
The MediaWiki software is useful when you have more than ten contributors and material that can easily be lost when not properly backed up. But when there are three or five trusted contributors, MediaWiki is a waste of database space. If a proper backup is scheduled, say, once a week, you should use any CMS with a decent search engine instead.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 10:03 am
by Aster
Interesting. I'll have a chat with Spangle himself and verify the story. In any case, I hope the hub, MCS and micraswiki shall remain...unaffiliated.

Re: The recent hacking attack against this forum

Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 5:35 pm
by ari
Well, Spangle did force all of you to be paranoid communists back when Ashkenatza and OpenMicronational were hosted on the same account, right? So, yes, I hope I understand that some ideological rebalancing will simply unavoidably happen. It spreads through the filesystem, you know.