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An Update On What Has Gone on This Week

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(@michael-cash)
Posts: 7610
Member Moderator
Topic starter
 

As everyone can hopefully see everything has almost returned to normal. With the exception of some articles and some forum posts and some outdated advertisements everything is back to the way it was prior to this Monday.

We spent about 4 days chasing problems around after some sort of failure Monday at 11:34am. We managed to get a portion of the site restored on Monday afternoon but a large portion including all the stats and public betting information was offline or displaying errors all the way till yesterday midday.

What we thought were technical problems turned out to be a veiled hacking attempt that mimicked an outage. We have restored the site back to the last good backup which was last Friday and have patched the hole that allowed the hackers access to our database.

I would like to apologize for the outage once again and the inconvenience it caused. I'm just glad this week is almost over.

Thanks to everyone who sent us emails and called about outages on the site, you have no idea how much that helps us isolate problems.

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 9:38 am
(@blade)
Posts: 318493
Illustrious Member
 

Thanks for the hard work Cash and Anthony I know you were about to blow a fuse the last few days.

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:02 am
(@michael-cash)
Posts: 7610
Member Moderator
Topic starter
 

It really had nothing to do with either of us. We were both at the mercy of the tech people. Big thanks to them. If it wasn't for them we would still be screwed

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:24 am
(@undefeated77)
Posts: 655
Prominent Member
 

What exactly did the hackers want? ???

Did they get what they wanted? :-

I hate hackers. 😡

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:27 am
(@michael-cash)
Posts: 7610
Member Moderator
Topic starter
 

Nothing. To fuck stuff up I guess. They succeeded so I guess they got what they wanted.

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:33 am
(@undefeated77)
Posts: 655
Prominent Member
 

It must be U.S. government hackers since they
hate to have Americans putting money into the
offshore sports books and making money from
the picks on this forum and not being able to
control it or make sure that taxes are paid on
the winnings. 😛

You guys must have done a system back up
because the avatar I switched to recently has
now been deleted and the one I was using before
a point several days ago has now been restored.
Oh well, they are both PUSSY CATS anyway. But
the blond one is much more gentle no doubt. 8)

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:37 am
(@michael-cash)
Posts: 7610
Member Moderator
Topic starter
 

I'm certain it was not anyone in the US or working with the US. We are fairly confident about where the attack came from.

The site undergoes two different types of backups, one that happens every single night and one that happens once a week. Using both of these sets of data we were able to put the site back together as it was on January 2nd. I wanted to restore to last Sunday but was told that probably wasn't a good idea since the attack was Monday early in the AM.

So the end result of that was the loss of forum posts, avatars, articles, new users, new newsletter signups, etc etc etc. Pretty much anything that wasn't a stat from Jan 2. thru yesterday at about 1pm.

Sucks to lose that stuff and have to go back and do a lot of stuff manually but the alternative was much bleaker.

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 11:51 am
(@blade)
Posts: 318493
Illustrious Member
 

I think I know who was behind it.

😀

 
Posted : January 11, 2009 12:03 pm
(@michael-cash)
Posts: 7610
Member Moderator
Topic starter
 

Last thing I want is that kind of attention

 
Posted : January 12, 2009 10:00 am
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