Big A
IFBB PRO/NPC JUDGE/Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
IFBB PROS
JUDGES
Registered
Newbies
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2002
- Messages
- 14,249
ProfessionalMuscle has its own physical server box, not shared with anybody else. I spend thousands of dollars per month on security measures, such as back-ups every 12 hours, cloudflare, ironclad security to the entire server and software, etc.
But that doesn't mean shit when a worker leaves a door wide open.
On Friday evening, a tech was doing upgrades to the server. When he finished, he left the port he used wide open without securing it. It appears that the scammer that has been impersonating me and doing damage to other forums, has been scanning the server regularly. As luck would have it, he got lucky and discovered that port only a couple of hours later.
At 3.35am USEST on Saturday morning, he took the site down. He erased the entire server - database, MySQL, all the software, etc.
That part itself doesn't matter, as the latest database back-up was performed at 10pm USEST, so that was reloaded and at most, we only lost 5 hours worth of posts.
When we reloaded the backup and we did a scan of the server, we found malware files left behind by the scammer/hacker, that would allow him back in. Just to be safe, we decided to scrap the whole server and set up a brand new box from scratch, just to be safe. But because it was the weekend, it took up to a couple of days to have it all ready and be back online.
All the above is just a nuissance, because an idiot worker fucked up.
The concern is that the scammer would have downloaded the database before he wiped the server. Which means he would have access to everyone's passwords on the site and their private message boxes.
I hope that none of you have used the same passwords to log onto ProfessionalMuscle and your emails. If you did, frankly, that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
If you had stuff in your pm boxes that you should have deleted, well, not the brightest move.
So, make sure you change your email passwords straight away and obviously change your passwords here before you do anything else.
But that doesn't mean shit when a worker leaves a door wide open.
On Friday evening, a tech was doing upgrades to the server. When he finished, he left the port he used wide open without securing it. It appears that the scammer that has been impersonating me and doing damage to other forums, has been scanning the server regularly. As luck would have it, he got lucky and discovered that port only a couple of hours later.
At 3.35am USEST on Saturday morning, he took the site down. He erased the entire server - database, MySQL, all the software, etc.
That part itself doesn't matter, as the latest database back-up was performed at 10pm USEST, so that was reloaded and at most, we only lost 5 hours worth of posts.
When we reloaded the backup and we did a scan of the server, we found malware files left behind by the scammer/hacker, that would allow him back in. Just to be safe, we decided to scrap the whole server and set up a brand new box from scratch, just to be safe. But because it was the weekend, it took up to a couple of days to have it all ready and be back online.
All the above is just a nuissance, because an idiot worker fucked up.
The concern is that the scammer would have downloaded the database before he wiped the server. Which means he would have access to everyone's passwords on the site and their private message boxes.
I hope that none of you have used the same passwords to log onto ProfessionalMuscle and your emails. If you did, frankly, that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
If you had stuff in your pm boxes that you should have deleted, well, not the brightest move.
So, make sure you change your email passwords straight away and obviously change your passwords here before you do anything else.