Bad FS News, AVSIM Hacked, Permanently Down

Steyr

Flight simulator site Avsim has been "destroyed" by malicious hackers.

The site, which launched in 1996, covered all aspects of flight simulation, although its main focus was on Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

The attack took down the site's two servers and the owners had not established an external backup system.

The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, said that the site would be down for the foreseeable future and was unsure if would ever go back up.

"The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from," Mr Allensworth said in a statement.

"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. "

Backlash

The attack has shocked the flight sim community, with hundreds of blogs, posts and tweets. One user on the simflight.com website said that "there's a special place in hell for hackers who pull stunts like this".

Speaking to the BBC, Derek Davis, editor of PC Pilot magazine, said: "It looks like 13 years of hard work on Toms 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," he said.

Mr Allensworth has set up a temporary forum for Avsim users while the future of the site is decided.

On it, he explained the site's backing up process, although he did not explain why the firm had no external media storage.

"Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers.

"The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation."

Mr Davis said he thought the site still had a future:

"I'm sure Avsim will rise like a phoenix from the ashes and will be bigger and better then before."


Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049780.stm



T W A T S !

:mad:

CaptainSkidmark

excuse my language here but thats ****ing disgraceful, it sickens me to the gut to see all that hard work gone down the drain. i hope who ever is responsible rot's in hell!

highlydebased

It is very very sad, just when I needed stuff from it

Mweelrea

Why on earth would anyone want to destroy such a great site?! sigh:(

pclancy

Mad, they were one of the very first along with flightsim.com. They mustnt have been able to afford any kind of decent enterprise type disaster recovery or offsite backup, never have have the entire core of your organisation sitting on two servers at the same location!

I hope they manage to get back up somehow.

Housekeeping Edit-Moved to Virtual Flying

squonk

With all due respect, sites get hacked. It it up to the site owner to make sure that there is some sort of backup strategy so that as little data is lost as possible. Yes it may have been a great site but if it was that improtant then it should have been regularly archived.

highlydebased

squonk wrote: »

With all due respect, sites get hacked. It it up to the site owner to make sure that there is some sort of backup strategy so that as little data is lost as possible. Yes it may have been a great site but if it was that improtant then it should have been regularly archived.

Of course- Apparently they merely backed one server up onto the other!

Well they will learn from their mistake this time

Nforce

The same scenario happened to SimOuthouse a few months ago........seems like the fs sites are under attack!

The guy who,allegedly, took down the Avsim site has been named and shamed on a number of sim sites. Seem's he was a new member of the Avsim team who had only recently been granted full admin rights to the site.:mad:

BostonB

Can't believe they didn't have an online backup. Even an old archive somewhere. Thats just unbelieveable.

bobblepuzzle

http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=41&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=220

Wow, this Phil guy probably has a lot to do with what happened....

highlydebased

It has been a busy day today, and I want the community to know where we are heading and what we are doing. I will take this step-by-step so that everyone understands what we are doing and why.

The Board of Directors of AVSIM tonight voted in the affirmative to purchase a dual set of either IBM x3650 or HP G6’s. Whichever we choose, they will be equipped with 48 gigs of RAM and some very serious hard disk storage. We will have those delivered to the NOC on Friday of this week. The total cost of those servers will be in excess of $24,000. This has been made possible almost entirely by the donations that have been sent to AVSIM over the last six days. Again, thank you! We will be placing this order tonight or tomorrow morning.

Stan Harmon and John Binner, who we are flying up from down south, will do an install over the weekend, starting on Friday. Keep in mind that they are spending their Memorial Day weekend to see this completed.

Why are we buying new hardware when we have two perfectly good servers already? Two primary reasons; first, we are going to remove their disks and have a forensic run on them and doing that would otherwise cause AVSIM to be offline for some time, even if we purchased replacement disks to use. Secondly, and more importantly, the new hardware will allow us to put into place a number of operational improvements, not the least of which is automatic fall over and a robust and secure backup system (we are also looking at remote off site storage as well lest anyone getting excited about that topic). The old systems we will use as auxiliaries to the two primary servers, and with WHITE, will give us a robust and scalable system.

As for the site content; by doing a forensic on the disk from PURPLE, we believe we will recover most of the Web Site and forum, if we do not already have that stored in backups on the NAS or on the good disks of GREEN. Given that the PURPLE disk will be out of our hands for a period of time, it could be some while before we bring the old forums back online, if they can be brought back at all. We fully expect to have most, if not all of the Library system on within a week or two. In any case, it is our goal to have a rudimentary web site up by Sunday evening EDT.

The design team headed by Steve Stratton is working diligently to bring both a new library and web design together. Once they are ready for prime time, we will replace the rudimentary web site and the new, more capable library when it is ready for prime time.

We will be posting more on this as the week progresses, but we thought that we would give you an update now to let you know that we are moving forward quickly to have AVSIM back online as soon as we possibly can.

Good news!!

pclancy

Wow amazing they got that much in donations so soon, great to see they'll be back online with a better DR strategy this time

Dotsie~tmp

My moneys in. Spare a few euros and think of all the great use you got out of the site over the years.

pclancy

Making great roads to recovery now, the early diagnosis of "will never be back" seems thankfully to be incorrect.

highlydebased

Thankfully, avsim has made a full recovery and has been back in operation for the last week or so