TooMuchBlue

My collection of rants and raves about technology, my kids and family, social/cultural phenomena, and inconsistencies in the media and politics.

2006-10-17

Invasion of the forum snatchers

My website just got hacked. OK, a small little portion of it. It’s just the old Forum pages I used to use. They’re not linked from anywhere anymore, but somebody found it under the incredibly easy-to-guess path of /forum, exploited a hole in PHP-BB (there are many!) and replaced the look with their own.

So my imminent, urgent project is:

  1. Move the site to a new directory so they stay the heck out of there.
  2. Revert to something I can actually see. (Their change throws a huge image over the top of everything.)
  3. Check for more significant damage.
  4. Fess up to the guy who hosts my site, so he can check for damage.
  5. Maybe possibly find the time to get the content out of there that I actually care about, and delete the darn thing.

So far, it just looks like a defacement with no permanent harm, but only time will tell.

Grumble, grumble!

Update: Turns out they hadn’t done much damage at all. The exploit they found only allowed them to create a forum of their own creation. They pasted an entire web page into the “description” field, which sat on top of the rest of the site. It looks like they tried to embed some flash movies as well. I didn’t recognize the faces, but it appeared to be Palestinian-sympathetic. People holding guns, mothers crying. I didn’t watch to the end.

I guess this means the war has made it as far as my website.

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