Website History
A web presence is as important to an online gaming community as a strong presence in the game itself. The community website has had a colourful history before it reached todays high standard.
Incident Reports
This is a list of times when things have not gone to plan and we've lost data. Feeling its important we don't forgot what once we had. I've listed these down in a series of reports. Hopefully this explains the gaps in our history as a community.
20th of December, 2004 - Webserver hacked.
In the virtual world sadly there is virtual crime also. On two occasions the community has come under attack.
The most serious attack was targeted against the Plus.net server hosting our website at the time. A malicious script was allowed run that deleted a massive amount of files hosted on the server before it was stopped. During the short time it as the community lost the extensive MechLab with all the MechWarrior 4 configs used. The legendary MAP Comics. Plus the photo gallery for MAP and CDW members.
Site Offline Until Further Notice
20/12/2004
On the 3rd of December a malicious script was uploaded and executed on the web server hosting the TNGC website. The script was able to delete thousands of files before being stopped. The consequence of this was the entire TNGC Gallery and several other files have been lost. Dark has only just brought to my attention the missing Gallery, 17 days after this attack. Backups for the TNGC website for the 3rd of December have since been overwritten as I only keep backups for 14 days. Meaning all data since the end of last year is gone. This is the date of the last backup I have on CD. Its totally worthless now and I doubt I'll bother to restore the files.
The delay in this problem being addressed has come about due to the fact I only check the TNGC Forums and Teamspeak pages daily. I rarely look at the other sections of the site. So I didn't notice. It would seem several people noticed problems but looked on it as a technical one and didn't report it to myself. Some members have signed back up to the Gallery and re-uploaded the custom avatars they lost on the forums without mentioning the problem to me.... doh!
For now I'm closing the site as this seems as good an opportunity as any to rebuild the entire TNGC website and move to a new host. Hopefully this will be early in the new year.
The forums are totally intact in terms of data with the exception of custom avatars. I shall be updating the forums software tonight and bringing the forums back online then as a temporary measure until we find a new home.
Sorry about this guys... if only I'd noticed sooner :(
Onwards and upwards.
Firejack (email: firejack@thetngc.org.uk)- Site Admin.
6th of March, 2005 - Forums Hacked
The second attack was directly against the community. Within the previous few days Stormhammer and Roboute defeated a Horde who obviously was so annoyed at being soundly beaten that the Horde player hacked our forums using a known new exploit in the forum software that hadn’t been patched. They removed all the posts and defaced the forums with;
Because this was a known exploit it was easy to patch and restore the forums with minimum downtime or lose of data.
