Forum Down

[youngceo]

If you tried to use the forum yesterday, you will have found the site was down due to maintenence.

Unfortunately, the person I purchased a vBulletin license from turned out to be associate with hackers.

A Trojan was found in the installation, as well as they were not allowed to transfer the license. They also set up several exploits in the setup that would have disabled protections that VB puts in place to keep the board secure.
This person also purchased hosting from me on the new CPANEL server i bough and established warez sites. The person claims it was someone else he gave the access to, howefver i have logged the MSN conversation where i warned him, and he admitted setting up some sort of hacker messenger site, and said sorry he was just "testing something.



Fortunately, this was caugh while they were doing it and all access to my servers and this forum were removed.

For the protection of my servers, this forum and all its members, we took it down. I put a dispute with paypal also. I am waiting on results of that.

I purchased a brand new vB license from VB and had another member here (web-viper) handle the install and mods.

Rather than 3 days (which the last person took, probably because of all the "extra" stuff being added) it only took him an hour.

At this point I have enough evidence to prosecute. Whether he was directly involved or indirectly invovled. I also have enough to file a lawsuit.
and despite him giving me a wrong address - i do have his real address.

As long as I have no more trouble with paypal I will drop it. For one reason, he is 14. And I have a soft heart. However if I ever get WIND of him attempting anything - I will use my full resources to ruin the rest of his life, and his parents.

I am sure he is reading this, so best to just leave things be.

At anyrate - your safety is a concern for me, and I will always do everything in my power to protect this board and its members.

What happened was a preventative measure, and I apologize for the inconvenience, but I assure you it ensures a much safer communtiy for us all.

Thanks for making this board grow so quikcly. and as you can see, we have some great new features now - so lets all continue to share, teach, learn, buy and sell together!

[.mpr]

Originally Posted by youngceo

If you tried to use the forum yesterday, you will have found the site was down due to maintenence.

Unfortunately, the person I purchased a vBulletin license from turned out to be associate with hackers.

A Trojan was found in the installation, as well as they were not allowed to transfer the license. They also set up several exploits in the setup that would have disabled protections that VB puts in place to keep the board secure.
This person also purchased hosting from me on the new CPANEL server i bough and established warez sites. The person claims it was someone else he gave the access to, howefver i have logged the MSN conversation where i warned him, and he admitted setting up some sort of hacker messenger site, and said sorry he was just "testing something.



Fortunately, this was caugh while they were doing it and all access to my servers and this forum were removed.

For the protection of my servers, this forum and all its members, we took it down. I put a dispute with paypal also. I am waiting on results of that.

I purchased a brand new vB license from VB and had another member here (web-viper) handle the install and mods.

Rather than 3 days (which the last person took, probably because of all the "extra" stuff being added) it only took him an hour.

At this point I have enough evidence to prosecute. Whether he was directly involved or indirectly invovled. I also have enough to file a lawsuit.
and despite him giving me a wrong address - i do have his real address.

As long as I have no more trouble with paypal I will drop it. For one reason, he is 14. And I have a soft heart. However if I ever get WIND of him attempting anything - I will use my full resources to ruin the rest of his life, and his parents.

I am sure he is reading this, so best to just leave things be.

At anyrate - your safety is a concern for me, and I will always do everything in my power to protect this board and its members.

What happened was a preventative measure, and I apologize for the inconvenience, but I assure you it ensures a much safer communtiy for us all.

Thanks for making this board grow so quikcly. and as you can see, we have some great new features now - so lets all continue to share, teach, learn, buy and sell together!

Well handled, congratulations. If his ISP and his parents (if they care) know and maybe have to pay a fine of some sort, maybe he'll re-think his hacking ideals... and hopefully quit. It's stupid that he would think a trojan wouldn't get caught in software like this.

By the way, have you seen your user title? "*****istrator" - maybe you want to fix that?

[youngceo]

I am sorry to have to announce yesterday we were down again.

This came at a critical time, as there was some marketing done and we recieved no less than 100 new visitors. Many of them saw no site.

It seems that there was MORE THAN ONE TROJAN. In additiona to installing this forum, John "zack" Fitch also had a hosting account with us, that he set up warez sites on. So the additional trojans were on the server itself.

Be wary, as he has been banned from several other forums, if you run across him, best to just stay away or call the authorities, whichever it merits.

And although we cant necessarily be 100% sure it was a trojan, my techs think its a good reason to believe its the cause of our major outage..

We had major hardware failure in the brand new server I purchased to handle the growth of this site. If you have been with us from the begining, you know that we were originally on phpBB on a shared hosting plan, and then I purchased a dedicated server and vBulletin to handle our super fast growth.

New harddrives had to be put in, and unfortunately it happened before we did this weeks back up.

As a result we have lost about 100 posts and new members. We must reinstall all mods, so once again, we will have to renew YC$ and trader rating.

We have done thourough scans of the new drives and will be doing backups more often. We are also doing a redundant backup system so we can know members and threads should any other issues arise.

Once again I am spending more of my personal time and money to ensure this forum is the best it can be.

I would not continue to do this, if I didnt know you all supported this concept and continued to participate.

Since we DID reach our goal of 100 members I will be giving everyone here $100 YC to stimulate our mini economy and I also ask that you contact anyone you know who is no longer listed who signed up the last few days.

Please, please please POST -as that is the lifeblood of our forum. Repost your old posts or new ones, but it is what we need to continue to grow.

This is all apart of rapid growth, and I am sure there will be more hiccups in the future. Just know, I am dedicated to this group and thank you for being dedicated also.

A part of being a CEO is facing challenges head on and not letting them stop you from achieving the goal. I will continue to lead by example.

This is truly something I feel will make us stronger as we move forward together.

Meanwhile, there are some GREAT JOINT VENTURES coming down the pipe that I will announce as soon as they are final.

Thanks again for making this the fastest growing business forum around.

Lets keeep sharing, teaching, learning, buying and selling.

[Marcvs]

YAY were back then;

and i got first post this time around