Fwd: CHI forums clean

[Dennis Piechota]

Wanted to share the good news. See below.

Dennis

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservator

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carla Schroer <ca...@c-h-i.org>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:43 PM
Subject: CHI forums clean
To: Dennis Piechota <dennis....@umb.edu>

Dennis,

It took longer and was nastier than we hoped, but we are completely clean and clear and actually hosted in a new location (same URL for users though) I've sent a bulk email to folks who have accounts on the forum announcing this.  It takes a while to propagate.  I wanted to let you and the folks on the google group know as well. Below, is what was posted on our announcement forum about the hack and current status. http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.org/

As before, we are committed to running the site as a free service to the RTI community.  Anyone can see the content on the site, but you need a free account to post anything there, or to see information about members. Also, the content on the site is available through search engines. So, for example, if you google "rtibuilder unknown error" the first response is the entry and discussion on the forum about this error http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.org/index.php?/forum/37-processing-rti-data/  (of course there is also search within the forums on the site)

Here's the post in forum announcements:

We are pleased to announce that the malicious hack on our forum site has been cleared, and the forum is now safe for our

users! We have taken steps to prevent this happening in the future.

 

Please note that our primary web site was never affected, and our database of forum users and data was not compromised by the hack -- no worries there.

 

A couple of important facts:

 

·       This forum site was never distributing malware. 

·       The hack was designed to redirect users to a site that is known to serve malware.

·       If a user did not follow the redirect (most browsers will detect this and prompt the user), the user was not affected.

 

The hack was nasty and took much longer to clear than we had hoped. There were a series of issues that needed to be taken care of to get things clean.  We will be posting more information about what happened for those that are curious, or who might want to learn from our experience.

 

The hack came in originally through an old copy of wordpress installed on a staging site on our domain.  It was self-replicating and difficult to remove. One step we have taken to keep our site up and running is that we have moved the forum to a hosted site run by the company that creates the forum software we are using. 

 

Thank you to all of you who stuck with us through this time.  There is a lot of great information here, and we hope that continues to grow.  Stay tuned for announcements about updated software and uer guides coming soon...

 

Carla

 

Carla Schroer
Founder & Director
Cultural Heritage Imaging
http://culturalheritageimaging.org