The Recent Outage

adrian

adrian

Flying Squad
Thanks for that - everyone's patience is appreciated. I'll write up a little more detail later when I figure out what exactly happened at the moment I'm still in the monitoring phase. Plus the fact I need to go and push the mouse around on my works laptop to show some activity - fortunate to have "flexitime" available.

So far it seems like the forum default email account (fs@westernthunder.co.uk) was hacked and used to send out spam. Fortunately Zen picked it up very quickly just unlucky on the timing in that the email notification I got was 17:05 on Friday when the technical support team finished at 17:00!!

So I have been busy resetting passwords and disabled that email account - please ignore any emails from fs@westernthunder, I've created an admin@westernthunder email account for the moment to monitor. I'm not keen on admin@ email accounts rather too obvious default name so will be changing it later.

All I have for the moment but will let everyone know any updates when I can.
 
LarryG

LarryG

Western Thunderer
Thanks Adrian. Good to see there was no lasting damage to WT. The outage took away one of my default occupations leaving just playing keyboard, sleeping in chair and avoiding daytime TV! So I fell back on coach building. It was strange after all this time and meant returning all the coach building materials to the workroom and re-mounting a mini 45-drawer unit on the wall.
 
Yorkshire Dave

Yorkshire Dave

Western Thunderer
adrian said:
No - it was the fs@westernthunder account on the web hosting site that was compromised.
Click to expand...

That would imply the hosting site will have to beef up their security. No doubt they'll be all over it as if can affect us it can affect other fora using the service.

And as others have noted - thank you for sorting this out.
 
adrian

adrian

Flying Squad
Yorkshire Dave said:
That would imply the hosting site will have to beef up their security
Click to expand...
As far as I can tell it was just the password on that one email account that was cracked. To be fair Zen hosting have been very good with their security and monitoring on the server, they caught this very quickly just the timing was a bit unlucky for support. It is one of the pitfalls of shared hosting - to a certain extent reliant on others sharing the same server to be just as diligent with the passwords and software they upload.
 
A

alastairr

New Member
Adrian - you have my sympathies. In times gone by you wouldn't be able to get hold of support because they'd be heading to the pub at 5pm on a Friday. When another forum and website was suffering from attacks we were also locked out by our provider - again shared hosting so they have default limits to protect all their customers. This is usually no problem, but I was on holiday in Cornwall at the time and spending time on the phone to technical support late at night on the laptop wasn't how I wanted to spend time away from paid IT work :)

It's worth remembering that apart from on RMWeb - no-one and I repeat absolutely no-one is getting paid, rewarded or otherwise for spending time fixing, diagnosing, battling with questionable support. People do it using their own free time and free will. In return patience and kindness costs nothing. Keep calm and make sure you have a backup, especially one containing thread pictures :)

Thanks,
Alastair
 
Pencarrow

Pencarrow

Western Thunderer
alastairr said:
Adrian - you have my sympathies. In times gone by you wouldn't be able to get hold of support because they'd be heading to the pub at 5pm on a Friday. When another forum and website was suffering from attacks we were also locked out by our provider - again shared hosting so they have default limits to protect all their customers. This is usually no problem, but I was on holiday in Cornwall at the time and spending time on the phone to technical support late at night on the laptop wasn't how I wanted to spend time away from paid IT work :)

It's worth remembering that apart from on RMWeb - no-one and I repeat absolutely no-one is getting paid, rewarded or otherwise for spending time fixing, diagnosing, battling with questionable support. People do it using their own free time and free will. In return patience and kindness costs nothing. Keep calm and make sure you have a backup, especially one containing thread pictures :)

Thanks,
Alastair
Click to expand...

I suspect even the paid role on RMweb doesn't really cover weekends, evenings and other stupid o'clock hours that forum admins end up working.
 
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