Thank you to Jag Staff

[Frank Broughton]

Last night just before the Ticket Center closed all my sites went down on my VPS. The Vpanel for the VPS was also down. Talk about bad timing.

All is back up and running this morning.

It looks as if someone hacked in possibly? and erased all the files. I did nothing! (in my best Sargent Schultz) Well one thing I did NOT do was change all my passwords from my old hostings account. Could it be possible they logged on with my old reseller account info (after all they could know I went here as I did a cpanel transfer of all that data) that had the SAME PASSWORD (yer an idiot Frank - I know) and dropped to shell and erased everything? I do have jailshell setup for all the accounts.

Anyways - THANK YOU JAGUARPC SUPPORT TEAM!

Greg, your men did me well and so did you!

[jason]

Was your old host run from a phone booth in a seedy part of town?

Routine password changes are always a good idea, especially when systems change. It is possible someone would have logged in to do that if they knew or could guess (you do use secure passwords, don't you?) your root password. Its also possible that someone used a vulnerability in your OS or a piece of software running on your VPS to gain access via buffer overflow, etc. There are any number of possible things that could have happened.

I'd check your access logs (if you still have them) to see if you can spot anything suspicious.

--Jason

[Frank Broughton]

We lost the logs...

I do use strong passwords. I had some very weak ones on some of the accounts. VERY WEAK!

I use 10 digit passwords generated with Access Manager. Access Manager is my life!!! Haha I have hundreds of passwords stored - bank account info - if it's private it is in there!

[Ron]

I know a backdoor to Access Manager


Ok, I don't, but just imagine...

[Frank Broughton]

Ya I imagine, you can just about pay off my credit card for me... ha ha

Then if you want to deposit 52 grand in my checking account you could also payoff my mortgage.

[Ron]

52 large to pay off the mortgage??

Boy, that $5.00/hr BBS biz was good to you! Do I remember it correctly, you had 12 lines coming in?

Ahhh yes, the old dial up mail eralys. How cool was that? Then when I setup a decnet node (late 80's? geeesh I can't recall ATM)... my eyes were opened to the possibilities. Talking from one host to the other was amazing, too.

[Frank Broughton]

Ron, I had four lines plus one local area people came over to the house and used. Along with my terminal we had six people chatting at once! WOW!

At its heyday WWIVNet had over 800 nodes, perhaps more I do not recall. There was another network called IceNET that started right here in Western - how ya think it got the name.

Hey but Jason living in Rochester gets more snow than I did when I was in Buffalo. I escaped from jungle 'er city to the country nine years ago. Only problem is I moved too far out, no DSL and the Cable line ends 800 feet away (rats will not extend it for me, even if I want to pay).

And Satellite is out of the question till you use that back-door and deposit some funds for me

[Ron]

I had fun in those hacker-friendly days.
I hacked a copy of DCOMM Plus so that it had two windows, and used two modems ( had an RS232based 1200 baud prometheus modem and a modem card), and I could be logged as two different people.

It was really fun once when people were just CERTAIN that two users were both me on that board... uintil the day we were both logged in at the same time!

Verizon offers their unlimited "high speed" internet access via cell phone or pcmcia card... I think it's down to $60 a month. It's better than dial-up if you are in an evdo area, or even an 1xRTT spot. Maybe something to look at for your laptop, but I *think* you'll have to use XP based ICS, as I'm not sure that there are any cell-phone compatible routers/hubs/switches out there.

[JPC-Greg]

Good to hear Frank. Im glad your all back up and running. Thanks for the praise and kind words.

[Frank Broughton]

Ron -> is there any way to test what zone I am in. I did look at the map on verizon's site and it shows I am in a evdo zone. But can I test some signal strength somehow here at the home front.

Jag -> You are welcome. I am very happy with my account here (I'm not gonna add "so far" to that - least I jinx myself again.)

With my sites being erased last night there was one more thing I did that jinxed me. I setup an account at siteuptime.com just minutes prior to the ordeal. Weird aye? My uptime report shows: uptime: 71.429% downtime:28.571% I want to see if I can delete the stats and start over.

[Ron]

Frank, find someone with a newish Verizon phone.. it will have indicators on the screen when it's in an evdo or 1xRTT area. Do you have a COMPANY Verizon store? If so, you can always buy a phone and service, and return the same with 15 days if you don't like it. I don't know if they refund all or a pro-rated refund.

Technically, they say that the service isn't for use from a fixed location, but I have difficulty believing they'll turn away your business.