It seem that the majority of the board on Ezboard didn't get restored after a month. Apparently Ezboard didn't have any real backup, and the server hosting a mirror of the information was online and protected only with a password. Also, there was no such thing as weekly backup, they were done monthly. If EzBoard business model requires these kind of deceptful business practice, they deserve to die a revenue-hemorraghing death. As a compensation we received 2 months of Gold community time, not worth much considering that the board is nearly wiped clean. I transfered this time to the Dragon-Tails community (who were fortunate enough to not be affected at all by this hack).
I have moved the community to the new board, since this move was already been planned and I was still playing with the idea to extend or not the Gold community. Its seems that hard decisions these day are taken by themselves and this board become the official message board of the website. We have lost a year worth of thread and I'm the first one to be upset about it. Fortunately, I a bi of an
I also lost the cleanup I did during the last summer when I put all the thread in the right forum. The irony in all this is I was going to make a new backup a few day before the gold community expire (around the 5-10th of June). It's timing like that that decide if this is luck or misfortune.
I would like to reassure the forum participant that backups of the board database will be made every week and stored an offline backup drive. Also, these backups will not be overwritten each week, therefore in the event a carefully planned attack would be made during the backup procedure, we would be able to fall back to one of the backups of the previous weeks. All this to say that the incident that happened with Ez Board will not occur on the new board.
- Tempest
Webmaster
Ezboard got hacked today, and as days are going on, we realize that they were not actually fulfilling all their gold community promise. A hacker managed to gain access to their whole network, exploiting a security hole that was present on all their server. This kind of situation happen from time to time to any company and this is where backups come into play. The problem with Ezboard is they kept those backups online on the same network of the servers... A ridiculous way of "protecting" data since that is the technical equivalent of me zipping my hard drive and copying it to another hard drive on my computer in case disaster should befall my machine...
[quote]We are continuing to restore posts and are working on additional means to restore further data. At this time we do not have an ETA for the completion of the restore process. Indications are that the restoration will be completed in the next 24 to 48 hours.[/quote]
Translation:
We may be about to start restoring data if we can find any backups since April 2004. We are currently running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what do do next. We haven't got a clue when or if we'll be able to restore anything. We've stuck our fingers in the air and decided to tell the users it'll be another 1 or 2 days to keep them quiet, although we'll turn that into hours to sound more technical.
- Tempest
Webmaster
