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Why the Board Shut Down For 15 Minutes Tonight
07-26-2019, 06:34 PM
When I checked my email after getting home from work tonight I found a dozen messages sent to me by the board software at around 4 PM local time. I won't go into detail, but it looks like someone tried to use a buffer overrun exploit to crack into the board. I do not think they succeeded, although my downloaded backup of the board was unusually large, and when I'm done with other tasks I will be looking into its contents to see what made the size jump.
In any case, I was overdue on a MyBB software update, so I decided to do it right freaking now. That was the 15 minute timeout. I threw up a warning in a banner for 10 minutes and even locked the board before I started, but apparently someone still tried to use the forums as I upgraded; sorry about that.
-- Bob
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
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RE: Why the Board Shut Down For 15 Minutes Tonight
07-26-2019, 06:40 PM
Oh, joy.
My first thought was "Good thing I use a unique password here"...
--
Rob Kelk
Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
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RE: Why the Board Shut Down For 15 Minutes Tonight
07-26-2019, 07:36 PM
I think that might've been me when it was offline.
OTOH I've forgotten what password I use here so if anyone has cracked it I'd appreciate if they let me know.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.
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RE: Why the Board Shut Down For 15 Minutes Tonight
07-26-2019, 10:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-26-2019, 10:33 PM by Bob Schroeck.)
And I've just trolled most of the way through the backup, which is one massive SQL file which recreates the entire board DB from scratch. Unzipped, it's a good 214 or so MB; amazingly (or maybe not) some 202MB of that are all the forum posts. I'm working my way through the last 11 MB of tables, and so far I haven't found anything that looks like someone dumped anything into any of the tables. I was concerned because for the last two years, the average backup size (when zipped) has slowly gone up from around 45 MB to about 53 MB -- and this backup came down and it was 120 MB. But everything looks right, both in the SQL and in the directory structure of the site itself... <shrug>
EDIT: Oh, and I gave my host a heads-up and at their request sent them an archive of all the error emails I got.
-- Bob
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
