Ahira's Hangar

Guys,

Apparently ezboard's been having some issues. I bet some of you have noticed. See the message at the top of the boards that I made viewable to all members...
p079.ezboard.com/fezboard...=504.topic
From the ezboard Help Boards:
Quote: Here is a summary of the symptoms resulting from today's ezboard server issues:
1) Certain boards and forums are missing topics.
2) Various request errors are hindering boards (when opening certain topics, when replying, etc.). The problem where boards' main pages were giving a request error should be fixed, though.
3) Some boards have reported losses of funds from their Community Chests.
4) Various boards' user member lists have lost a number of users or gone blank(?) .
5) Certain boards' security logs have gone blank.
6) The ezboard network is slow.

Along with our technical operations department, we have been and are continuing to work on the solutions to each of these problems. Until we are able to come up with specific instructions for each issue, please sit tight. We will make each set of instructions available as soon as possible.

On behalf of ezboard, I apologize for the inconvenience and thank all of you for your patience (we apologize for the lack of an immediate update, but we have also been hindered by request errors and time-outs when trying to post here). Again, we will update this topic as frequently as possible.

Hopefully they'll get everything back up. "If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes." - Sir Thomas More, "A Man For All Seasons," by Robert Bolt<i>Edited by: mhoram6910 at: 5/31/05 3:00 pm
</i>

Dang--looks like we've temporarily (I hope) lost the last month's worth of posts... *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>

Actually, MsMary just realized that in some cases, its over a year's worth of posts. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

Hang in there everybody (worse things have happened on alotr of other boards) give them a couple of days to try to reboot the system--sounds like some really evil hacker hit and hit very hard--son of a bitch! (sorry kids ) *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>

Quote:On Tuesday May 31 ezboard's systems were the victim of a very precise and malicious internet attack. This attack resulted in the loss of a significant amount of current and historical board postings and interrupted services across all systems. I deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused and am here to give you the first of several in-depth updates.

At this time most board management services have been restored and our goal is to have post/reply repaired on Wednesday . We are working to restore board data from our back-up systems. This will take some time, and complete data restoration may not be possible, but it is what we are working towards. What we know now is that the attacker deleted current board and back-up data. We are taking the fastest route to restore data, but it may take up to 48 hours to get data back to approximately 9,000 boards. A more manual method requiring upwards of seven to ten days is required to restore data to the other boards that lost data. Regrettably we may not be able to restore data to all boards that lost data.

Second to restoring board data we are gathering information on how the attacker went about his or her business and what evidence was left behind. We are using this information to reduce the opportunity for future attackers as we build our new release. Should you hear or read anything about this attack we would love to know about it at legal@ezboard.com.

You should be aware that there is no evidence that personal information was touched. There was also no opportunity to see or download credit card information as ezboard does not keep credit card numbers on file.

Again, I apologize to you for any inconvenience caused as we value your participation on ezboard today and as we move towards an exciting - and more robust - version of the experience. We are working to restore your systems as fast as possible. Gold Board managers will be receiving information on GB subscription credits in the next few days.

We we keep you updated as the restoration progresses.

Sincerely,

Rob

Robert Labatt
CEO
ezboard, Inc.
Whenever these guys post updates, me or Danlo will try to put them in this thread to hopefully keep you all updated on this problem. "If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes." - Sir Thomas More, "A Man For All Seasons," by Robert Bolt<i>Edited by: mhoram6910 at: 6/1/05 12:17 pm
</i>

Quote:At the moment, all problems listed above are being worked on by the technical staff. We would ask that all admins wait for further information and updates on these issues. Once these are forthcoming you may be asked to submit your board url and describe which problems affect you, but at this point in time it is better if you do not post or submit tickets, as the staff are unable to take action yet.

You can continue using your boards. If certain forums at your board are giving request errors (e.g., when replies are submitted), an administrator may want to create NEW, temporary forums. Then, when the "broken" forums are fixed, the topics from the new forums can be moved into the appropriate, old one.

Edited by: ezatlass at: 6/1/05 13:25

Please help us by listing all the problems you see here: I'm aware that all the Dune Group Read and all the Dune Encyclopedia have vanished...thanks




*****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 6/1/05 2:56 pm
</i>

danlo,

Sweet Jesus, all the posts in the Sports forum are gone except for the two stickeys. There were 3-4 pgs of posts in that forum. "If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes." - Sir Thomas More, "A Man For All Seasons," by Robert Bolt<i></i>

What I find sort of strange is that most of the forums have about 14 months worth of posts gone (back to early April, 2004). The two Dune forums were wiped out (which makes sense, I guess, as they were created after that date). But there are some threads that look like they initially survived the carnage in a couple of forums -- general science fiction and the manifold. But when you click on those threads, you'll see that most of the posts are by unknown user and that the posts themselves say that post is lost and unrecoverable.

Every time I come here, I hope that some of the lost data will be restored, but nothing at all has been restored yet, as far as I can tell.

I have started a couple of new topics here and there, but I am sort of reluctant to add posts to existing topics, until I know whether or not the missing posts will come back. For instance, if I wanted to make a post about the NBA playoffs, should I start a new topic, when the old topic might pop back tomorrow? It just seems to make sense to wait on most things...

And I do not think I will do another Dune chapter this weekend, as I do not know whether to go back to chapter one, or continue on where we left off, at chapter 14. That's definately something to wait on...
******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

The latest:

Quote:
Posted: 6/3/05 13:46
ezboard Attack Update - 06/03/05
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Dear ezboard Family,

Good morning and thank you for your patience as we continue to restore your data and return our systems to normal operation.

This will be a long update, as I want to be as thorough as possible and incorporate threads from the many phone calls and e-mail discussions I have had with ezOps, admins and users in the last few days. I hope that by being open and explicit we can give you a better understanding of what has happened, where we are in the restoration process, and when we can all expect to get back to normal.

I've broken all this information into topic areas to make it easier for you to find the topic that you personally care about the most.

When will my board get its data back?
The most difficult and painful thing for me to report is that it will be impossible to restore full data on all boards. We will send out a Global Announcement once all possible restoration procedures have been completed. During this process, you can expect to see some slowness on the boards, but we’ll return to normal speeds as soon as the restoration is complete.

I realize this creates great uncertainty for many of you still waiting for data restoration, and so I want to give you the following, much more detailed description of the data restoration process we are undertaking in our efforts to get the most back we can, on the fastest time frame possible:

Data restoration began the day of the attack with the restoration of eight servers that we could salvage immediately. Sadly, no other intervention was successful at that time.

Since that time, we have been assembling data from three sources: the remaining historical backups of some 8,000 Gold and trial boards from early May, the current data recently written to hard drives since the attack, and data in RAM memory since the attack.

The actual restorations using this assembled data have been underway since Thursday afternoon, and are being done on a server-by-server basis. The process is automated and each server takes approximately 6 hours to restore. We can restore between 8 and 10 servers in parallel. To some of you this may seem like a long time to restore data on a single server. And it is. However, we are using an innovative process to maximize the data recovery and testing it thoroughly to make sure that (a) we don't erase the posts that have been made since the attack and (b) the data is being properly restored.

When this server-by-server process is complete, we have one final source of data that we may be able to use for restoration. With quick thinking and fast action on the part of your technical team we were able to do an emergency backup of active data. To be clear, this is by no means all the board post data, only the active data at that time. We will be restoring this data as a last step in the process.

We are working as fast as possible on the restoration process - believe me, the faster this is completed the happier we all will be.

What happened in the attack?
What we know is that late in the evening on the holiday Monday, May 30 here in the US, a person with significant and specific information attacked our systems. The attacker was successful in erasing historical board posts and the backup systems, which were password protected and on a separate network. They did not erase the posts of boards that were active on the system at the time.


What more can you tell me about the back-ups?
The issue was not the back-up systems themselves. Our back-up systems have been working well and are separate from our production environment. They are not accessible without inside technical information and passwords. The issue was that either through luck or (more likely) specific information, the attacker was able to delete both the historical files and the back-ups.

What are you doing so this doesn’t happen again?
We have put additional safeguards in place to reduce the opportunity for this to happen in the future. We will also be undertaking a highly detailed security and back-up audit in the coming weeks.

You should also know that we have been Alpha testing the new community software for three weeks and in addition to increased security, redundancy and back-up systems, it will have the ability to allow ezOps to back-up their communities (in addition to daily and weekly incremental backups) to their home computers in an automated fashion. For some ezOps this should provide an additional level of safety and peace of mind.

Can't you give us more frequent updates?
We have been updating you as soon as there is new information. Since the attack we have put out five global messages and have had two conference calls with ezOps and admins. In addition, the Customer Service help desk and Support Forums have been very active. On a more personal basis, Steve DeMello and I have been responding to hundreds of e-mails from users, ezOps and admins. As of 7AM PST on Friday we have responded to every e-mail that has been sent directly to the two of us.

If you are looking for ways to get up to date information fast I recommend reading p079.ezboard.com/fezboard...ouncements first. Please read the materials already available before contacting CS -- the response queues are pretty full, as you might imagine.

What can you tell us about the attacker?
I can tell you that we have suspects, we have evidence and we are working with the FBI. I can also tell you that we will be working to have the attacker punished to the full extent of the law.

While we do have evidence, we can always use more, good, factual evidence. We are offering a $5,000 reward to the person or persons that provide us with factual information that leads to the direct arrest and conviction of the attacker. We are not interested in conspiracy theories, finger pointing or childish pranks. We are interested in information such as community postings or blog entries where the attacker is bragging about the attack and other factual, real information. Please e-mail information to legal@ezboard.com. When you e-mail please provide a link to the original material AND a screen capture of the original material or at the very least, copy and paste the original material into your e-mail. Please be smart, ethical, law abiding and honest about the way you find the information your provide to us.

Now the fine print: A reward will be paid to the person or persons that deliver to legal@ezboard.com information that leads to the direct arrest and conviction of the person or persons that attacked ezboard.com earlier this week. Should more than one person provide identical or substantially similar information that is used for the arrest and conviction of the attacker, the reward will be split equitably amongst the providers of that information.

Will you be providing Credits for Gold Boards?
Yes we plan to provide credits. We need to understand the scope of the data restoration before we decide on the amount of the credit. I would anticipate further news on credits to be available in the next week.

What happened to my Community Chest Balance?
The Community Chest balances were deleted as well, but we do have a back up of that data from a few days before the attack. We need to recalculate the actual Community Chest balances by taking the balance as of the date of the backup, adding Community Chest contributions and subtracting payments from Community Chest. We hope you agree that restoring Community Chest data is a second priority to getting the board posts restored

Please don't worry about your Community Chest balance, it will be restored and updated.

So, where do we go from here?
First let me say that we at ezboard are deeply sorry about the attack this week. The person that did this to us probably had a great chuckle when they pressed the send key to initiate the attack. Little did they know that they would affect so many lives in so many ways. I have heard from cancer patients, historians, mothers and schoolteachers about the way that their boards were damaged and were of vital importance to them. What the attacker did was take a great big piece of many peoples lives including the folks here at ezboard. For that, I hope we catch the attacker and return the favor by taking a bit of their time - behind bars.

We are working to restore the boards as fast as we can. We know your trust in ezboard has been deeply shaken. Now we are trying to rebuild that trust, and are realistic that this will be difficult and take time.

We plan to keep messaging you on our progress. Some of you may have already seen data restored as we started the process on Thursday. Please check p079.ezboard.com/fezboard...ouncements for updates.

In closing, we are working to get systems back to normal and believe that they will be back soon. We are fixing the security and backup processes now and will be performing a security and back-up audit in the coming weeks. Thank you for being an ezboard user, and for reading this, and we hope that you will continue to use ezboard. Let’s put our communities and our network back together, and bring the attacker to justice.

Sincerely,

Rob

Robert Labatt
CEO
ezboard, Inc.

robertlabatt@ezboard.com
******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

Quote:Dear ezboard Family,

Hello on Sunday and thank you for your patience as we continue to restore your data and return our systems to normal operation.

The ezboard tech and CS teams are still working for you and working hard to get data back into the system. They are not a group of complainers, but I will tell you that on average the team has been working 20+ hour days to get your data back.

Here is where we are at this point:

Where are you with the restoration of board data?

The automated board restoration is continuing. Approximately 1/2 of the boards are restored to the fullest extent possible, 1/4 are being restored now and 1/4 have yet to be restored. We started with the low numbered servers and are working toward the higher numbered servers.
You should know that boards are being restored on a server-by-server basis. We don't actually restore a 'board' but rather we restore a server. Many servers are being restored in parallel and your server will go through several restoration processes, several times with data arriving from five different sources. This is not simple stuff.


We apologize, but we cannot be more clear on what is happening on each server and board at this point. Please be aware that while we want to respond to all of your very important questions as fast as possible, every bit of energy we expend doing that is taking away from energy that could be spent on managing the restoration of the boards. Taking time to generate timelines and debate the nuance of a changing and complex restoral process will only delay the completion of the restores. While we will continue to respond to direct inquiries, the more you can simply refer to this page for updates rather than send direct inquiries, the better.


This one is from today. I would guess that we are among the 1/4 of boards which have yet to be restored, as I have not seen a single post return to us yet?

******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

I posted this, just now, in the "Who's board hasn't been fixed" thread at the EZboard Help forum: p210.ezboard.com/bahirashangar We've lost two full forums and date back to April of last year on many others. *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>

Hopefully something will happen soon... ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

Quote:
ezboard Attack Update - 06/08/05
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear ezboard Family,

Let me start today’s update by telling you that the information published yesterday remains accurate – for quick reference, I have attached yesterday’s update to the bottom of this message.

Based on your emails, and questions to staff and in the Help Forums, I’d like to address three additional questions today.


Should I contact you with my questions on payment, account issues etcetera?

No. Please direct questions on those topics and questions you would normally send to CS to helpdesk.ezboard.com

Please do not e-mail me directly with these issues, as I will forward you on to the CS team. You will not experience a faster response from CS as a result of my being involved.

Can I resume normal activities like posting and reading on my boards?

Yes, you may resume normal posting at the majority of boards. We are aware of the issues (i.e., request errors) that are affecting approximately 1% of boards and are working to repair them. If you are experiencing problems that are new in the last 24 hours and have not been reported or seen before, please post a bug report at p079.ezboard.com/fbugsfrm177


I’ve been told of a way that I can restore my own topics, should I do it?

Yes and No. Many topics have been restored, but do not appear on the topic listing page. It is not harmful to reply to these topics, but we have implemented a way to automate the restoration of topic titles.

If your question is not answered above please continue to carefully read the balance of this update. Should your question still not be answered after reading this update and you don’t think that our customer service team or help forums can answer your question then please feel free to e-mail me at the address below.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.
******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

Quote:
Posted: 6/9/05 13:00
ezboard Attack Update - 06/09/05
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited to add one additional Q&A

Dear ezboard Family,

Let me start today’s update by telling you that the information published yesterday remains accurate – for quick reference, I have attached the Q&A from previous day’s update to the bottom of this message.

Based on your emails, and questions to staff and in the Help Forums, I’d like to address the two most frequently asked questions:

What is the status and timing of the restoral process?

I’m pleased to announce that almost all servers have completed the first three steps of the restoral process, and we plan to start the final two steps on a server-by-server basis later today. Based on our testing, we expect boards that were active at the time of the attack to see a significant amount of data restored during these final two steps.

We anticipate that the final two restoral steps will take a total of seven to ten days to be completed. Individual servers will be restored throughout that time. This means that you will see your board/server restoral sometime within that period. We are in the process of acquiring additional servers in an effort to accelerate this process.

Please be aware that the final steps are the most computer power intensive, and you will notice at least moderate slowness on your server when it is being restored. We will not respond to requests to have your server restored first, and cannot restore an individual board on a server.

When you said “we expect boards that were active at the time of the attack to see a significant amount of data restored during these final two steps”, what did you mean by “active at the time of the attack”?

“Active at the time of the attack” means that members were actively posting and reading. While we cannot determine how much data will be retrieved for a given level of posting and reading activity, we can tell you that the more active a board was (therefore more of its data was in RAM) the more data will likely be restored. The flip side of this is that an archive board that was not active at that time would not have much or any data in RAM and therefore would likely not be as likely to have data restored.

******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

According to EZChief we may start feeling some actual topic restore late this evening and tomorrow. Let's hope something really does happen-or my chain will start... (spontenous, nervous laughter) You can alway go to The Restaurant and sing the llama song endlessly while you wait! *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>