We're back online again.

I've never heard of a mysql db getting corrupted.

Oh, there are MySQL virii out there for sure. More importantly, the 'bot' opening in M$'s structure makes Windows very vulnerable. As if Window$ users needed more to fear.

www.virusthreats.com...

news.com.com...

There's no solution. There is no security in the computer industry. If someone wants in, every lock can be picked. Backups are the key to surviving, long term. That and education.

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Yike. The frontpage appears to be a bit slow now. Also seeing errors at the bottom.

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Hope it's nothing big

Originally posted by AlienS

Originally posted by picard_is_actually_a_grey
Glad to see its back up, whats bizarre is a number of sites went down yesterday all at the same time, exact same time. Someone I know said it was web wide attack using 'packets'? or something. So when I just read that it was down because of an attack (and not just SO tripping on the server wire lmao), it is of a concern.

Hmmmmm... 2 other sites which I go to daily (,both on dedicated servers,) were also messing up yesterday. One of them is still down today, and the other was back up in less then 2 hours.

Yep.....Our server here at FSU went kaput too....The whole networked system was down for half the day, on and off...

Anyone have a solid lead on that?

Excellent work as usual Skeptic! Thanks for getting on this fast and restoring the boards "virtually" unscathed. This looks as if it could have been a messy issue so thanks for your dedication to ATS.

Originally posted by smallpeeps

I've never heard of a mysql db getting corrupted.

Oh, there are MySQL virii out there for sure. More importantly, the 'bot' opening in M$'s structure makes Windows very vulnerable. As if Window$ users needed more to fear.

www.virusthreats.com...

news.com.com...

There's no solution. There is no security in the computer industry. If someone wants in, every lock can be picked. Backups are the key to surviving, long term. That and education.

It this the windows version of mysql? Also I have port 3306 firewalled on my machine. It does not accept external connections. Now I know there are some things you can do to crash a mysql db especially if the form data isn't properly cleaned up. But given the fact that someone would try it I will not mention what that way is. I found out what happens when I was testing some db work I was doing.

Originally posted by marg6043
Hellmutt at least you are still in the chat I can not join because I don't have 200 post,

Marg...the introduction threads are a great way to say hello to everyone and get that post count up.....

ATS should switch over to Mac G5 servers. Because then nobody writes viruses for Macs anyway and they do have two really good processors (2.5 GHz 64-bit each) plus can handle up to 8 gigs of RAM.

Maybe something to think about...?

And seriously, all you Mac haters out there ATS doesn't need to have awesome graphics or Windows only games. It's a website, so you can just leave all your stuff about games & other stuff out, all you need is a huge bandwidth and fast processors to send the data out faster, and a ton of RAM (like 8 gigs, perhaps?) to reduce harddrive overheating.

Originally posted by smallpeeps
There's no solution. There is no security in the computer industry. If someone wants in, every lock can be picked. Backups are the key to surviving, long term. That and education.

you are right. and it aplies to everything, not just computers. no alarm, lock, or other security systom on earth is impregnable. if someone wants something bad enough they will get it. just look at some of the inventiveness of some bank thieves, they have camped out in safes and even tunelled into them. criminals have even begun to disable satalite tracking car theft systoms,(no surprise here). just think of security as an arms race. you design something to keep someone out, someone always comes up with a way to defeat it.

again we have to thank skeptic overlord and his staff for getting the board back up with most things intact. it sounds like there was quite a lot of fun and games over the web the last few days.

I hope you get that WEBLOOD SUCKERS, and give them back what they disorve... you know ATS is becoming more and more popular, and of course sadly that attracks good and bad atention

It's nice to be back. I actually got a surprising phone call this morning. This person told me they had really bad news. I was wondering what dreadful thing happened. They told me they couldn't log onto ATS anymore. I correctly assumed it appears that this was probably either a result of a hacker attack or maybe a covert secret government order to install new monitoring software to better monitor and sort data on all of us conspiracy folks. I was thinking it could be explained as a hacker attack.

It's nice to know this was not the only site affected. That explains why I couldn't use other sites and just decided to turn off my pc. It's pretty bad when you can't even load a search engine site such as google.
There may be a market for that ATS IV drip.

Here is how apache/php and mysql work....

mysql opens processor threads to handle your requests. So lets say a mysql thread eats up 25 mb. If there are 10 queries then there is 250mb of ram used. Most queries are so fast they open and drop in a fraction of a second. A big query can use a bit of processor but not really that much.

Apache does the same thing mysql does. It has a thread open. I think I have mine to default to 8 or 10 idle threads. With my configuration I think they are about 16mb each. It works just like mysql. It opens a thread for each connection and closes it when the ocnnection is done. This can add up to a TON of threads because the hmtl page that gets sent plus EVERY image served counts as a connection. So 1 page + 8 images = 9 threads. It is very light on cpu but heavy on memory.

Having php compiled in effects the amount of memory apache uses. A raw apache install might require 4 to 6mb of ram while loaded apache with php and ssl might use 20+. These numbers are estimates.

CPU usage for the most part is never an issue. Dual procs are nice for extensive db use. It just allows more queries to be processed at the same time which doesnt allow the que to build up. Once a certain limit it is hit the threads will be put in a wait que. That is where the delays come in.

To help memory usage on my system I have 2 apache servers running. One is on the default port of 80 and the other is on 8080. The main one handles the display of the web pages. The one running on 8080 serves basic content like images, downloads, etc. Something where plain serving is required and no php. This saves me a great deal of memory. I can have 3 or 4 threads open and use the same as 1 thread on the main server.

Clear as mud?

Don't let that happen again, I got to work yesterday and ended up having to do work.

...and can someone tell me what ID is?

Has anybody found out who was the hacker.WAs he a member at ats?

I'M THE HACKER MUWHAHAHA! j/k mods, don't ban me

A funny thing is:

(ended up playing gta3)

I was playing GTA2! I downloaded if legally for free on the rockstargames.com website it's a conspiracy to let us all play GTA

Man, I had seriously withdrawels, I was going to message boards I rarely visit normally

good to be back! thanks alot skeptic overlord! beat em! hope you find who did it...and report him if you do...he/she/it deserves to burn, sure there weren't any strange objects floating above the ATS HQ? like a saucer or triangular craft?

Originally posted by smallpeeps

Someone I know said it was web wide attack using 'packets'? or something.

Probably your friend was referring to the 'packets' that make up all the traffic on the Internet. These are the packets that TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) uses to deliver everything on the web.

Basically, every 'infected' computer connected to the web will obey commands given to it. So if your computer is hijacked (by your opening an email wrongly or whatever), a hacker could use it to continuously bombard a target site with a million requests, thereby shutting it down. This is called denial of service attack and the largest documented one involved something around 30,000 computers. NOTE: That's 30,000 computers infected with a single specific program/virus which has a specific instruction that wakes it up to do it's dirty work. Maybe your friend was referring to a DOS attack?

This situation sounds different. The original post says there was massive database corruption, but what was the cause of it? It's not hard to corrupt a DB if you can trick it into overwriting certain sectors but you still have to gain accesss to the server. Every database has a sword of damocles command hanging over its head and cutting the thread is as easy as however hard it is to gain access. I'm impressed at SO's discipline in regards to backups. 24 hours of lost data is considered a major success of your backup methodology. Well done, SO.

Here's the latest threat list from Symantec. No database viruses in the last couple days, but the ATS bug could have been a program which was inserted at any time in the past. I guess it's a subject for RATS anyway.

securityresponse.symantec.com...

[edit on 20-4-2005 by smallpeeps]

If it was a DOS attack. I think alot more websites would have been effected. Everyone here remember the script kiddie who hacked yahoo, CNN, ect and shut them all down for hours about 4 times? Funny how someone with limited knowledge of a computer... using only programs given to him/her with no programming skills could take down some of the most visited sites in the world today. Here's the nostalgic link to the story

Script Kiddie Hacks CNN

Cool. I can post stuff and have a gazzillion ads thrown me in the process.


HELP

ME,

WHERE

AM
I?


SO MANY ATS ADS, WHERE DO I GO?

[edit on 21-4-2005 by Enigmatic_Messiah]

Please dont let this happen again,
i had to do work at college plus, i decided to go out into the real world for once (which i didnt like doing)

yippeee!!!!! i'm back on the board today.

i like the rest had serious withdrawals too..............

thank you thank you ohhhh great SO for getting us up again!!

its a shame that a cyber attack was launched against us. that is so not cool. what the heck is wrong with people!! good grief!!

glad we're back and on line!! super job super super job!!

angie

I had just posted the answer to life the universe and everything, and that post seems to have been lost.

I can't be bothered to type it all out again.

Well, i'm just glad we're back. My girlfriend thought it was funny that ATS was down, i didnt...i was deeply losted without it