The flight sim community suffered a terrible blow recently as malicious hackers essentially destroyed a longtime website which catered to aircraft game devotees.
The BBC reports that Avsim, launched in 1996, was devastated when hackers trashed both of its servers. Founder Tom Allensworth said in a statement:
The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all.
Derek Davis, editor of PC Pilot magazine, told the BBC:
It looks like 13 years of hard work on Tom's part could have been wiped out. Avsim is an important site, because it services the whole community as a source of community developed terrains, skins, and mods - its contribution has been immeasurable....
Via: Ars Technica
Comments
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
While this does suck bad for him and the many users, I think this is a good illustration of why you should always have an off-site and off-line backup of your work...especaly if you spend 13 years on the project.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
There are two types of hackers out there that I know of.
Thos who do it to try and help by exposing security holes, which I have no problem with as they try to help.
Then the assholes, those who hakc an account because they beleive they desrve maximum gain for minimal effort, and for "the lulz" which is even worse, destroying hours, days, weeks, months, or even years of effort just for a cheap laugh.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
So what do you think the odds are that the hackers will be caught?
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Debates are like merry go rounds. Two people take their positions then they go through the same points over and over and over again. Then when it's over they have the same positions they started in.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
First, this is terrible indeed. Who would hack a nice site like that? Dedicated to helping people...in the flight sim community... terrible indeed.... :(
Second, I agree with the people who are saying that they really needed an off-line backup.
I can only hope that members of the community have backups of theior own, I mean most modders should still have their own mods and other stuff?
The forums might be hard to bring back, though... (if they indeed had forums?)
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Not too long ago, I had someone hack my personal site and delete my database. It was mostly my fault for not cleansing the input from my contact form. Luckily, there was nothing stored in the database that was not replaceable, but it was frustrating and it made me feel violated.
Needless to say, I now cleanse all my input as well as backup necessary data.
E. Zachary Knight
Oklahoma City Chapter of the ECA
http://www.theeca.com/chapters_oklahoma
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
Random Tower: Game News and Commentary
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
THIS IS WHY WE CAN HAVE NICE THINGS
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
I feel really sorry for the webmasters and the whole Flight Sim community, and I wonder who did it, and especially WHY ?
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
'The Lulz'
Bunch of spoilt brats who will quite happily ruin other people's fun, and yet manage to be some of the biggest whiners out there when caught.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
It's a flight sim modding site, not the friggin' CIA.
Check out my blog - http://serveratcapacity.blogspot.com
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
I saw a previous article concerning this incident and if I recall correctly their backup was also erased as it was stored on a 2nd networked server. The comments spawned a long list security ideas and arguments.
Long story short their security was overall sub-par and they got taken by some prick.
Once more proving no one is too small or niche to be ignored by pricks.
The question is if anyone outside of them managed to back up most of the data, if they're lucky they have a few avid users that have most of the deleted files.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Ain't that the truth, I have an entire (retired) website that isn't mine backed up on my flash drive in case the servers went down or got hacked. The website is mostly text and images so it doesn't take up much space.
The website is obscure though so me doing this is probably unneccessary but oh well.
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Debates are like merry go rounds. Two people take their positions then they go through the same points over and over and over again. Then when it's over they have the same positions they started in.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
To destroy all the data like that usually involves someone on the inside. How else would they be totally unable to bring the site back up (unless of course they didn't back up anything)?
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Good lord, are you guys even reading the articles or other comments posted here? It's been mentioned several times that the second server that got destroyed was the backup. And since they didn't have any offsite, that was it.
Reading comprehension, it just works.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
I gotta agree with most people on here so far.
How do you run a site for 13 years and not have any backups? That sort of thing has been standard practice pretty much forever.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
It takes many man powers to make something great like this but it takes one douchbag top destroy all the hard work.
http://www.magicinkgaming.com/
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Firstly: What a bunch of cunts! I've something similar happen a while ago with a pair of websites I used to help run, years of work lost because of a prick. Although in this case it was because of atrocious management which I argued against for more than a year before it happened...
Secondly: Do they not have any sort of backups? Thats pretty bad management
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
"Do they not have any sort of backups?"
They did, but it got hacked too. As EZK said, they should have had an offsite back-up.
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"The sun will always rise tomorrow. We can only live for today, and hope more days will come." -Unknown
"A Chrono Trigger is anything that unleashes its will or desire to change history!" -Gaspar
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
I think there's two lessons to be learned here:
1) The world will never run out of small-minded destructive assholes.
2) Back stuff up regularly.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Yeah... Much as I do feel sympathetic for the people who ran the site and the people who used it, how could they have made it "impossible to recover" if the owners kept backups?
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I'm not under the affluence of incohol as some thinkle peep I am. I'm not half as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me, and the drunker I stand here, the longer I get.
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I'm not under the affluence of incohol as some thinkle peep I am. I'm not half as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me, and the drunker I stand here, the longer I get.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
According to ArsTechnica and the BBC article, the second server was the backup server. Why they didn't have an offsite backup is beyond me. Server redundancy is a great thing in case the primary server has issues, but you should always make regular data back ups and store them off the network for cases just like this.
E. Zachary Knight
Oklahoma City Chapter of the ECA
http://www.theeca.com/chapters_oklahoma
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
Random Tower: Game News and Commentary
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
Agreed, off-site backups are vital, having your backup networked to your main server is always going to be cause for trouble. You can get half a terrabyte of removable storage pretty cheaply these days, plug it in, back it up, remove it, store it somewhere safe.
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
What's the reasoning behind this now? somebody just decide to be an asshole or something?
Seriously, who trashes a flight sim site?
Also, great pic, I kinda want to go fly my Cessna somewhere now. Maybe somewhere near Centralia, Pennsylvania... anyone know an airstrip near there?
Re: Respected Flight Sim Site Shot Down By Hackers
My guess? They should look to see if anyone was banned from their forums or lost a flame war...