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Hacker
Over the past few weeks TESSource has been "under attack" from a Chinese hacker who targetted certain areas of the site in an attempt to infect visitors with multiple trojan viruses. This basically involved injecting code into the database of the site via an external site.
While it is unfortunate to have your work sullied by such a pathetic individual, the actions of this hacker have forced me to upgrade the site more, adding in more security checks and hack-proof additions that can only be good for the future of the site.
On Thursday, when it became apparent to the hacker that the holes he was using were being plugged up, he made some last ditch attempts to infect as many people on the site as possible. He changed all the author names in the file database, and all the download names in the database, to a nasty script call. This is the reason why many author names and download names have been lost.
I'm relatively confident that most of the holes have now been plugged and we should not be seeing a repeat of this problem any time soon. However, please remain vigilant of any suspicious areas on the site and report anything you find out of the ordinary to me.
An old backup for the author names and download names had to be used, so if you have recently uploaded or updated your files on the site you might want to check that everything is as it should be. I've also coded a small new feature that lets you change the name of the individual files you have uploaded, so you don't have to remove and reupload your files just to get the file name back.
If you are an Internet Explorer user and have visited this site regularly over the past few weeks then I strongly recommend running a full virus scan of your system, just to be sure.
I'd like to thank all the folks over at the official forums for their support and help.
16 comments
There's jobs like that. People hack for reasons of good. Like maybe a police station has someone hack into a computer of a suspect in a case to see if there is anything on it.
It might be an act of revenge from someone who got banned, or might just be to prove to someone else that he can hack, but whatever reason it is I also am glad to hear that he's been taken care of, especially seeing as my computer screwed up after going on tessource while he was hacking it.
You would destroy your own computer, unless you're defending web sites.
I know that some hackers do what they do for the same reasons that murderers murder, or thieves steal, or rapists rape - self gratification (and maybe for a little self enrichment, and perhaps maybe even to define themselves). But I honestly don't see ANY purpose whatsoever in hacking into a website just for the f**k of it. It makes absolutely no f**king sense.
I am glad to hear he's been snubbed, and I hope it's permanent (well, maybe not permanent, since hackers are ALWAYS trying to find a way into a website, no matter HOW many layers of security it may have). Anyway, if I ended up becoming a hacker, I'd hack the hackers and destroy their comps
i personally noticed the attempts myself my antivirus kept kicking in alerts every few days or so, hence why i emailed+pics about this.. even though i got no replyyyy
long live TESSOURCE!
and to the guys who fixed it.. as they say in oblivion
Well met!
They were in few places, but one was in system volume restore (or whatever). I had problems with that before, so in case someone doesn't know how to solve this here's the procedure:
right click on my computer and go to properties, system restore and check Turn off system restore. This will delete backup of your configuration (which is infected btw.) and the trojan will be gone.
After that, uncheck turn off system restore to create new backup.
I found that on some forum, it was pretty useful to me.
I will get started renaming them.
This may be unrelated but now any use of ' or or / results in duplication of the // that precedes a / to be printed as is. example //////quoted text/////. I am using the ``for a , one` for a ' and \ as replacements for now.