Possible hacker intrusion attempt on website?

I noticed 3 or 4 postings in the past few hours containing apparently meaningless gobbledygook. Beware! We had the same thing happen over at the Galway Astronomy Club when we had our own forum on the website. Turned out these were exploiting a vulnerability in the forum software to upload covert pages onto the site. These pages, whilst not directly linked to our site and not visible on there to the casual browser, were spoof "eBay" & "PayPal" pages with links thereto sent out in mass spam emails as a "phishing" exercise. When it was brought to my attention, I used an FTP client to look through all the files uploaded to the site, and there the 2 pages were! Needless to say they were removed PDQ. So, check your site files carefully, guys!

Happy Xmas and hope to see you at the Galway Astronomy Festival on the 27th January.

Yea we noticed the junk. We just had a shortage of people with enough privileges on the forum to deal with it promptly. When we get the right people online we'll check the site and software versions etc.

Thanks.
~Albert

Hi folks,
there is no hack. As you all know (or should know!), all new users since last Spring had to be validated by any of the (4) Administrators. The bad accounts, some of which can be seen as spam anyway by either the username, the profile contents, or both, are deleted by us automatically as we use these boards. But, the validation process is done by clicking a link sent to us by e-mail, seperate to IFAS, to be clicked on to activate a new user. However, sometimes we are busy and simply validate the new users without checking their name/profile. This is not always needed either, as even seemingly inoccuous usernames can freely generate spam messages, as happened today (I was away at the time, but the 'offending' posts were rectified by Dave Power).

We are a secure boards, there is no need for alarm, and the posts (mostly financial/betting spam) should not deter you all from continuing to actively use these great boards!



Seanie Morris.

Thats great news Seanie, thanks for the update.