# Internet forums falling to southeast Asian hackers



## BrianK (Sep 10, 2013)

I was just reading a thread on ArboristSite and it went down hard. 



> .:: Hacked By rEd X ::.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## maple1 (Sep 10, 2013)

I just tried to get on there & hit the same thing.

Really hope it's not contagious....


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## Jags (Sep 10, 2013)

They are still down.


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## MrWhoopee (Sep 10, 2013)




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## MrWhoopee (Sep 10, 2013)

Quick recovery. Just after I posted this, they got it back under control. Glad I got the shot, though.


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## BrianK (Sep 10, 2013)

Their main forum page appears to be back up but the subforums are still down:



> *Not Found*
> The requested URL /firewood-heating-wood-burning-equipment/ was not found on this server.
> 
> Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.



It went down while I was reading a thread on the Firewood subforum around 1:00am. I posted a thread here:
*Internet forums falling to southeast Asian hackers*


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## Tinder (Sep 10, 2013)

It's not actually fully recovered yet and many of the forum sections are still unavailable.


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## MrWhoopee (Sep 10, 2013)

Apologies to admins. As usual, I posted in the wrong place.  I've always had problems with boundaries.


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## BrotherBart (Sep 10, 2013)

As good a place to post it as any since the forum members that are AS members are primarily active in the Wood Shed.


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## Jags (Sep 10, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> As good a place to post it as any since the forum members that are AS members are primarily active in the Wood Shed.



Yep - that is exactly why I just moved it to the Inglenook.

(I had to have been moving it while BroB was typing.)


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## BrotherBart (Sep 10, 2013)




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## Jack Straw (Sep 10, 2013)

Maybe I should lock up my firewood


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## Gary_602z (Sep 10, 2013)

If they are going to hack your firewood get them a Fiskars!

Gary


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## Badfish740 (Sep 10, 2013)

If they really wanted to torque some bolts over at AS they could have redirected the site here:

http://www.barackobama.com/


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## BrianK (Sep 10, 2013)

Badfish740 said:


> If they really wanted to torque some bolts over at AS they could have redirected the site here:
> 
> http://www.barackobama.com/


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## BrotherBart (Sep 10, 2013)

Bad mouth Chinese saws and splitters and that is what happens....


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## StihlHead (Sep 10, 2013)

They seem to be up now... that site was always going down for various reasons though, back when I was over there a lot.

A similar site, TreeWorld.info is gone now. Eric is being sued (deservingly so) and he took the site down for good.


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## Thistle (Sep 10, 2013)

Was up for a bit,down for past 45 minutes or so again.


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## StihlHead (Sep 11, 2013)

Looks like they are still fixing the hacks. A lot of the headings are in Spanish there today. Amusing... (looks like the personal settings were all hacked there).


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## webbie (Sep 13, 2013)

Well, we've went 18 years without a defacing but nothing is forever. Sooner or later the odds work against you.

Main thing then is to have a good backup as well as a smart system administrator (not me!).


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## StihlHead (Sep 13, 2013)

Yes, and backup the backups. I used to do daily backups for a military contractor, and I made 2 sets of 8mm data tapes; one stayed in my desk local and one went to a rad hardened storage facility off-site.

As for AS... they use vBulletin, which is a widely used forum tool that has a huge number of sites. As a result are the target of many worldwide hacking efforts (especially in south Asia). I do not know where the AS servers/data storage are hosted from. It could be either a vBulletin or a server farm HW hack. More likely vBulletin, as it seems that there are a lot of potential hacking holes in that SW. They have had a lot of problems on AS over the years, and were typically down for a day to several days periodically in the years that I posted there.

Recent vBulletin hacks in India/Pakistan:

http://thehackernews.com/2013/09/major-vbulletin-based-websites-are.html


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## Jon1270 (Sep 26, 2013)

Seems to have happened again.  Every AS link I try to follow from Google is redirecting to some spam advertising site.  I have an extension that hides the ads, but still can't see the page I was trying to get to; I just get an empty screen with a nonfunctional 'skip this ad' button in the corner.


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## Jon1270 (Sep 26, 2013)

Okay, this one wasn't so hard to deal with.  I used a javascript blocker to disable "linkbucks.com" and "dyo.gs" and AS is now functioning normally for me.


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## pyroholic (Sep 26, 2013)

Jon1270 said:


> Okay, this one wasn't so hard to deal with.  I used a javascript blocker to disable "linkbucks.com" and "dyo.gs" and AS is now functioning normally for me.


Huh?  Are those new tree species?  Never heard of 'em.


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