Site was down!

[JonPurpleHaze]

Pinball Nirvana was down for 2 damned weeks due to a hacker!
Sorry about this everyone!


Files were removed from the server and I didn't have a complete current backup, had to merge several different backups, I'm still working on stuff but any custom avatars, signature pics and album additions added since approximately 1/29 are gone and the user will need to re-upload them.

We lost 1 download from GaBRi (The Matrix) and I will contact them, the others since 1/29 have been restored, any attachments uploaded to the forums were restored. Have some current problems with missing screenshots from Tii in the downloads area but these need to be removed and reuploaded as a file (links cause some problems) anyway, I'll contact him.

It took over 2 and a half days just to upload all of the files!
Kindly post about any problems that you discover and accept my apologies.

Jon

 

[sleepy]

And what an interesting journey it has been.
The hacker may have ripped the member e-mail list.
I received a spam offering me a webpage by the username sleepy,
and the message title was the same as the previous hack several months ago,
so I can't be sure if this was due to the current vandalism.
The title was "Hello dear, good news!", same as the spam I received several months ago. A Unique Title.

The spam was crossed linked by a hack of the emuforums.com site and and was sent from their admin@crowdgather host. Crowdgather is a California based host. I felt safe in contacting them and sent them the spam reprint with full headers.

The link which offered me my own webpage was instead a 'make money' spam site, but the interesting thing is that the URL was http://howtoregister.lakeheadu.ca/rss.IamSleepy.html

It was a hack of a University website (Lakehead University: Canada) that either inserted a page using the /rss/ subpath, else the /rss/ sub was a (javascript) redirect hack to an offsite 'make money' page.
This exploit with the same URL sans Sleepy was reported elsewhere at hacker watch sites and has since been removed from the university site.

 

[sleepy]

These are some of the screenshots for Tii's tables. Don't know what to do about the table links though. MyBad!

 

[Itchigo]

Thanks for all the hard work Jon! Now things in the universe are balanced!

 

[sleepy]

Yes Jon. Much appreciated! :)

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Thanks for all your very hard work, Jon. I knew you wouldn't "AJ" us!

 

[GSGregg]

Sorry I missed the grand reopening; thanks and welcome back, Jon!

GSG

 

[sleepy]

This is a Good Day.

 

[Liteuser.]

Thank you Jon.

It's Good to be back at Pinball Nirvana. :)

 

[tiltjlp]

Appreciate your hard work JPH. A sad commnetary on the stae of the world that this sort of thing happens.

 

[sleepy]

So, does anyone know if this hack was about spamming or was it just hostile vandalism?

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Thanks for all your very hard work, Jon. I knew you wouldn't "AJ" us!

 

[Patch]

Keeping here & IRPinball going is much appreciated Jon
Hoping you don't have any more attacks to contend with

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

hmm, the site seemed to be mostly down the past 12hours or so, although evidently not for all peoples?

anyway, just wanted to post this link that you might want to add to your records in case of future outage. it would be a place to regroup and try to figure out the issue.

The Virtual Pinball Forums

Page 1 of 2 - Pinball Nirvana is NOT going to shut down... - posted in General Chat: Im posting this here as Pinball Nirvana was the longest running VP forum and historically one of the oldest VP sites. At the very least is/was very much a part of VP history, whether you cared for the site or...

www.vpforums.org

 

[shiva]

Was down for me, but only 6 hours. Tells me there was a routing issue getting to the server and not the server itself. A quick look tells me everything was fine. Guess it was extra scary considering GoPinball finally went down as well today.

 

[xenonph]

Same here...
Sometimes the page would not load and I got this message..
Other times, just the chat box loaded, and nothing else.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Same here, and incidentally, earlier I got the same error type (503) trying to use The Wayback Machine to bring up the product link in this old thread. So it does seem like some regional stuff going on. Or something.

 

[GeorgeH]

The site seems to be getting a little slow again.