Hi jacked

[pamcook]

Some folks are reporting major problems with PAO. Beth is working on it and trying to reach Admin. For some reason, it looks fine from my computer...

[Monica]

looks fine to me.....

Monica

[Holly]

looks fine with me also.

[pamcook]

Evidently it's the home page. The good thing is they aren't locked out so Admin & Beth are currently working on it. Good to know they didn't get the forum! Could you imagine if all our projects and swaps disappeared?

[bethrich]

The forum is OK, but the home page has been hacked. Admin will be looking at it shortly.

My suggestion is do what I am going to do. Have some dinner (or a snack) and get crafty while admin fixes us up. I don't want to get a virus!

I'll be back online later. Oh, yeah, American Idol starts in a bit!

[jfugina]

It's not a virus. Someone exploited a hole in the software that was used to build the pretty version of the home page. It won't take but a few minutes to get that back to something that will link to the forum, but it may take a while to get the homepage re-built. What we might have lost is the swap calendar. But that should be about it.

For those who have the homepage bookmarked, just change the bookmark to come directly to the forum.

[jfugina]

Nearly back. The redirects aren't back in place yet, but the hack wasn't terribly sophisticated. It was easy to fix. Fortunately, nothing was lost. The bad news is, that while I know exactly *what* they did, I don't know *how* it was done. So it could happen again.

I'll try to do some research to see if I can find any known exploits on that software and what to do to patch it.

Sorry for the mishap.

[pbp908]

I have to tell you - I panicked when I came home and tried to go online and all I could see was a Turkish gaming site.

My first thought was

[jfugina]

Well, I can't offer any guarantees until I know how they did it in the first place.

But for now, it's back, and I need to go have some dinner.

[pbp908]

Thanks a gazillion Julie. Nice to know I can come back home! And for now I've saved the forum as my bookmark instead of the homepage.