WhiteKnight77 Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Hackers 'destroy' flight sim site relates how one of the largest flight sim sites was brought down by a hacker. "The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from," Mr Allensworth said in a statement. "AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. " Backlash The attack has shocked the flight sim community, with hundreds of blogs, posts and tweets. One user on the simflight.com website said that "there's a special place in hell for hackers who pull stunts like this". Speaking to the BBC, Derek Davis, editor of PC Pilot magazine, said: "It looks like 13 years of hard work on Toms part could have been wiped out. "Avsim is an important site, because it services the whole community as a source of community developed terrains, skins, and mods - its contribution has been immeasurable," he said. I have used this site almost daily for my FS needs and wondered when this happened after not being able to log on to the site for the past 2 days. This is an example of why backups should be made to a seperate server or location. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 I'm not quite sure how this made the BBC news, not wanting to sound too harsh, but hundreds of sites are hacked in some manner every week. I think the only news here is regrettably that the backup regime was lacking - local backups are a must, I'd never trust anyone to do my backups for me - even if they say they are. It is kinda unusual for a hacker to delete entire partitions though, and not leave a calling card. To me, this was either a malicious attack by someone with a personal grudge against the site, or it was a failure at the server nothing to do with hackers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pave Low Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day...... Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. "The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation." Doh! very bad disaster recovery plan, to not think of ever loosing both servers at same time. Yes, They definitely should have had local copies, Especially as some of the articles & data they had is irreplaceable Interesting "coincidence" that this happened within 24 hours of them firing a guy they had hired as an admin for a month to upgrade the site and they fired him for harvesting members email addresses! The Spamming Incident Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Ah, that does sound extremely co-incidental. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dannik Posted May 15, 2009 Share Posted May 15, 2009 It's hit Slashdot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteKnight77 Posted May 15, 2009 Author Share Posted May 15, 2009 This episode is a reminder to ensure that backups are sent elsewhere, maybe a home PC at the least, to ensure there is no data loss. For AVSIM, this is most likely a loss of terabytes of information. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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