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- Nov 27, 2005
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Hi everyone.
As many of you know, the site was down for a significant period of time this morning. The reason for this is that the site was hacked. The person who hacked the site was Bee.
We removed Bee from the staff yesterday for general inactivity as backend administrator. This was our choice. She was fired because she was no longer performing well in her role and we needed an active backend administrator. In retaliation, Bee hacked the site. Many others did as well, using IP addresses from around the world. We have proof that Bee was behind this. The culprits did not hide their tracks as well as they thought they did.
In addition to the site hack, Aberforth was personally hacked and is currently dealing with personal consequences as a result. Aberforth has been the backend admin for less than 24 hours and had no part in Bee's firing. He is not responsible for what happened in any way. Some of you have sent him hate messages about how he replaced Bee and even blaming him for what happened today. Anyone caught doing that again will be permanently banned from the site.
Bee has been permanently banned from the site. We are considering further options.
We are also taking steps to address security vulnerabilities on the site. To start with, we are working with our friend Shawn, @Sreeya's husband. Shawn is a chief technology officer (CTO) in Red Hat's Public Sector team in Washington DC, and he has worked in cyber security for 17 years. He was the one who restored the site today, and he will continue working with us for at least the time being in order to address security issues. We nearly lost 4 days worth of post, but Shawn spent the entire day restoring everything so nothing was lost. Please join us in thanking him.
To be clear: we see no evidence that anyone else's accounts were compromised or personal information stolen. We believe that only Aberforth was targetted 1) out of retaliation for taking Bee's place and 2) to drive him away so there would be no technical assistance after the hack. We will continue investigating this to make sure no one else was compromised. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can always change your password as an added security step.
We're not going to go into detail about security steps we're taking, because we don't want that information in public, but Shawn will be doing a very thorough job.
If you have any questions, please let us know.
As many of you know, the site was down for a significant period of time this morning. The reason for this is that the site was hacked. The person who hacked the site was Bee.
We removed Bee from the staff yesterday for general inactivity as backend administrator. This was our choice. She was fired because she was no longer performing well in her role and we needed an active backend administrator. In retaliation, Bee hacked the site. Many others did as well, using IP addresses from around the world. We have proof that Bee was behind this. The culprits did not hide their tracks as well as they thought they did.
In addition to the site hack, Aberforth was personally hacked and is currently dealing with personal consequences as a result. Aberforth has been the backend admin for less than 24 hours and had no part in Bee's firing. He is not responsible for what happened in any way. Some of you have sent him hate messages about how he replaced Bee and even blaming him for what happened today. Anyone caught doing that again will be permanently banned from the site.
Bee has been permanently banned from the site. We are considering further options.
We are also taking steps to address security vulnerabilities on the site. To start with, we are working with our friend Shawn, @Sreeya's husband. Shawn is a chief technology officer (CTO) in Red Hat's Public Sector team in Washington DC, and he has worked in cyber security for 17 years. He was the one who restored the site today, and he will continue working with us for at least the time being in order to address security issues. We nearly lost 4 days worth of post, but Shawn spent the entire day restoring everything so nothing was lost. Please join us in thanking him.
To be clear: we see no evidence that anyone else's accounts were compromised or personal information stolen. We believe that only Aberforth was targetted 1) out of retaliation for taking Bee's place and 2) to drive him away so there would be no technical assistance after the hack. We will continue investigating this to make sure no one else was compromised. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can always change your password as an added security step.
We're not going to go into detail about security steps we're taking, because we don't want that information in public, but Shawn will be doing a very thorough job.
If you have any questions, please let us know.
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