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Sunday, July 1st 2005
EzBoard Hack - Part 2 Re: EzBoard Hack EzBoard Hack Re: EzBoard Problems EzBoard Problems
It seems that the majority of the boards 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 deceitful business practices, they deserve to die in a revenue-hemorrhaging death. As a compensation we received 2 months of Gold community time, not worth much considering that the board is nearly wiped clean. I transferred 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 PhPBB board, since this move was already been planned and I was still toying with the idea to extend or not the Gold community. Its seems that hard decisions these day are taken by themselves and this new 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'm a bit of an
I also lost the cleanup I did during the last summer when I put all the threads 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 decides if this is luck or misfortune.
I would like to reassure the forum participants 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 EzBoard will not occur on the new board.
- Tempest
Webmaster
Monday, June 6th 2005
Update 04-06-2005: The good news is that several boards around has been restored with only a few weeks of missing data and Ezboard is currently restoring 10 servers at the time, each one taking 6-8 hours to return online. Also, there has been some activity on the board: some post disappeared so this means they are merging what was left on the board with the information on their backup. It shouldn't take more than 24-48 hours before everything is restored.
Update 05-06-2005: I'm extending the forum countdown for another 17 hours to see if EzBoard will restore anything (they seem on the verge to). And yes, the countdown is actually about moving to the other message board in case this one remain closed for too long. I'm asking you for another day in order to write my welcome message and prepare a few other things. So tomorrow we will see if we move to the other board immediately or if we stick with EzBoard to salvage a few threads and evaluate the extend of the damage. Either way we are moving to a better board.
Update 06-06-2005: As EzBoard staffs are still trying to restore this message board, the move to the new forums takes effect immediately. Please register.
- Tempest
Webmaster
Thursday, June 2nd 2005
I have a few precisions about the Message Board problems and as days go on, we realize that they may not fulfill all their gold community promises. To recap the events, Ezboard got hacked last week-end; 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 why backups are so important. The problem with Ezboard is that they kept those backups online on the same network of their servers... A ridiculous way of "protecting" data since it's the technical equivalent of making copy of all my data on a second hard drive connected on same computer in case disaster should befall my machine... It's good against a hard drive crash but it's useless against virus, power surge or fire.
[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 to 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
Wednesday, June 1st 2005
To be on the safe side, I am no longer allowing people to post in any of the forum since posting may hinder the process of restoring the board. Once the problem is resolved, this restriction will be lifted.
- Tempest
Webmaster
Tuesday, May 31th 2005
EzBoard sent us a notice explaining most of the problem encountered with the board. They currently addressing the situation and requesting us to be patient while they work to solve this problem.
Also Please note that the board while near empty, isn't deleted and if anything bad happenned server-side, the whole forum will be restored from backup (a gold community privilege) so don't worry everything should be fixed in a day or so.
- Tempest
Webmaster
