Nightscrawlers

Wait a minute, you're probably thinking, what hacker crisis?

For the past few weeks forums like ours have been targeted by hackers who have been able exploit to a security hole in XMB 1.9.1 to gain access to the Super Administrator account and after taking control, raise all sorts of hell by deleting accounts, forums, and the works. You'd think people would have better things to do with their time.

XMB immediately released an upgrade that plugged the security hole, but for us to run the upgrade on Nightscrawlers would have required us to shut the board down for a day or two. We didn't want to do that.

Something you guys don't know is that for the past few months we have been running a second version of Nightscrawlers simultaneously on our server. This "test-nightscrawlers" lets us try out new things before we put them on the real Nightscrawlers. It's been a pretty small endeavor though. This would be our biggest project using the test board ever.

And it was a success! You never knew that we completely upgraded Nightscrawlers about 2 days ago. We are now safe and sound - protected from hackers.

The real thanks have to go to Northstar and Bamfette who did all the work. They did the forum upgrade and reinstalled all the hacks while I stood around wringing my hands. And Karl should get a nod too for impressing upon me just how important this upgrade was even when I wanted to blow it off. We could have ended up like this poor fellow.

Thanks again Bamfette and Northstar! It's really cool to look at this effort and think back to where we were at this summer. Nightscrawlers has come such a long way technically that it's hard to imagine we were ever in such a bind.

Thanks!
-e

Woowoo! hacker-proof! (well until something nastier comes along *cough*) but you didn't hear me say that

Kudos to Karl, (and Lenny?) Northstar and Bamfette!

Nothing is hacker (cracker) proof but you can take steps to protect yourself by keeping up with all the upgrades and such.

As with Darick's forum, phpBB has a long history of being hacked. Hackers love to wreck havoc on phpBB boards for some reason. Too many security holes? And there is one thing I suggested at the XMB support forums which Invision Power Board has and that is a login page to access the Admin Panel. This makes it harder for people to gain access to the Admin Panel.