Speedo wrote:Are you allowed to reveal why or how this happened? I'm sure a lot of us are curious.
Long story short, an exploit was released for SolusVM (a very popular control panel for companies that provide servers) which allowed an attacker to perform any command on all nodes. This was a zero-day exploit so shortly after it was released, many companies that use this control panel were hacked.
The company I host the majority of my servers with (including PTT2) was also hacked.
“Around 3am Eastern Standard Time (EST) today, there was a security breach, due to a vulnerability in SolusVM that allowed a command line to be run to dump the SolusVM client database and attempt to delete all data from our nodes. Our staff is working tirelessly to get everything back online, along working with SolusVM to address the root issue and no furthur impact is expected.”
Unfortunately, the hackers were successful in deleting all data and dumping the database. This resulted in all servers being wiped. I did not have automated daily backups running for the forums, so the latest backup I had was of around 4 months ago.
I've now set up things differently, and have daily backups of the forums/database. If anything ever happens again, it won't be much of a problem to restore the forums.