914world was hacked ... Options

[SirAndy]

We were hacked on Sunday 11/13

The attackers hacked one of the admin accounts and gained access to the administrative part of the site.

They went on to change passwords for several user accounts and started impersonating users, posting for sale Ads in the classified section asking people to pay via Zelle or Venmo.

The affected user accounts are:
ClayPerrine
Freezin 914 (The name was briefly changed to "Great")
Ansbacher
dlee6204

If you responded to any of those fake Ads and sent money through those services you need to contest those charges asap.


The hackers then went on to delete most of the forums on 914world.
Luckily i was online at the time and was able to shut down the server before they could wipe everything completely.

Due to the nature of how the data was deleted i couldn't simply revert to a previous backup of our database. I had to start with our latest backup and manually merge in data from the corrupted/hacked database.
While this has taken pretty much exactly 2 weeks (i do have a day job) we were also lucky. Because of the way the data was deleted i was actually able to recover almost everything with very little loss (less than a handful of threads).


There are still quite a few threads that need to be moved to their respective forums and i'm going to need some help from the members to make sure everything gets moved to its correct location.

I created a "Recover" forum that currently holds all those orphaned threads that need to be moved somewhere.
http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?showforum=86
It would be helpful if you could look thorough there and point at any threads you recognize and let me know where they need to be moved to.


NOTE
We do *not* store your password (never have). There is no way the hackers could have gotten your password, even with admin access.

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[Amphicar770]

Thank you Andy. I just upgraded to a paid subscription in recognition of all you do.

Many automotive and other forums have vanished in recent years. People do not realize the time and expense that goes into maintaining and supporting such an effort.

It is probably safe to say that most people here have availed themselves of information which has saved them hundreds or thousands of dollars. Kicking back $25 of that for a paid subscription seems more than fair.