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David_Snowball
in Fund Discussions
Hi, guys.

We suffered minor vandalism on the site at about 6:00 a.m. CST today. Apparently a fairly prolific hacker, perhaps an Indonesian hacking consortium, tagged us. In response, we've changed all of our internal passwords (they're now, Chip assures me, "mile-long strings of characters") and our ISP has completed security scans of the site. In short order, they're going to rollback the site to what existed last night. That means that any changes (both posts and hidden code) over the past 12 hours or so will disappear. We regret the inconvenience, but we're trying to be exceedingly careful.

I'll ask Chip to update you once we have more complete info.

David

Comments

  • msf
    edited February 2017
    Much better safe than sorry. Hope Chip is up to the task. Health comes before anything else.

    Thanks for the heads up.
  • VintageFreakVintageFreak
    edited February 2017
    do we need to change OUR passwords?
    Also I still see a "hacked by " link on the main page.
  • thundley459
    Thanks for the update. I too see the hacked by on the main page.
  • David_Snowball
    I don't think so, but I'm waiting for Chip and the ISP's verdict. The short version is that this particular group seems to do no damage to the sites they break into. They spray paint their name on your wall and then use it to buy status within their hacker community.

    It's almost identical to what happens on the side of train cars or highway underpasses.

    The ISP is still working on the rollback.
  • [Deleted User]
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • hank
    Welcome to the club. My PayPal account got hacked by somebody in Russia about 5 years ago. They were "selling" products in my name and pocketing the $$ without shipping anything. Nice huh? We took appropriate measures once we learned about it.

    Sorry to hear this David - And at a bad time with Chip temporarily down.
  • MaryKay
    Can someone explain to me what benefit the hackers get from hacking this site? I could understand it if there were credit card numbers here, but not a chat forum.
  • InformalEconomist
    @MaryKay: Well, quite a few benefits. Bragging rights, as David mentioned, could be high: it's publicity, and also a demonstration of capability. If the hack originated in a rogue state, the security apparatus may be hovering in the background.
    If the hackers do get your password from this site and you have used it on other sites, you could be at risk.
    Changing passwords is a good idea in any event.
    Some mutual fund sites require a new password every 6 months.

    All best to Chip. A tough development.
  • [Deleted User]
    edited February 2017
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • David_Snowball
    Hi, guys.

    So far as we can tell, nothing's at risk. We don't collect any personal or tracking information about anybody, other than the email address you sign up with. We channel contributions, including those in support of MFO Premium, through sites with far better security resources than we could ever afford, so there's no financial data anywhere here.

    It literally looks like this group breaks into sites, announces their presence (you can Google their name to see a list of who they've tagged) and goes.

    We're still trying to answer the "how did they get into WordPress?" question, but we may never know for sure since there's an entire underground industry devoted to challenging their software. It's the software behind 76 million websites, nearly a quarter of the planet's total, so it's also an understandable target.

    We'll get back to cleaning up the mess and getting February posted, but the need to do the security changes is slowing us.

    Be well!

    David
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