Recent Forum Outage discussion thread
Hello SimplyDiscus community,
We want to provide a transparent explanation of the recent site outage and the loss of some forum content.
On July 27, a security vulnerability affecting many versions of vBulletin - the software that powers SimplyDiscus - was publicly disclosed. On July 29, our site was attacked through this vulnerability, affecting the display and uploading of images.
The site was attacked again on July 31. During this second attack, the attacker installed Monero cryptocurrency-mining software on our server, which significantly affected its performance. We immediately began cleaning and repairing the affected files, but the site was being attacked nearly as quickly as we could restore it.
To protect the forum and prevent the potential loss of additional data, we made the difficult decision on August 1 to take the website and server offline.
After reviewing our recovery options, we determined that the safest course of action was to restore the server to a backup created before the attacks began. Unfortunately, our most recent unaffected backup was from July 26. As a result, any posts, topics, images, account changes, or other forum activity made after that backup are no longer available.
We understand how frustrating and disappointing this loss is, especially for members who contributed during that time. We sincerely apologize.
We kept the site and server offline throughout the weekend while we worked to restore the system, upgrade the forum software, and apply the necessary security patch. That work has now been completed, and SimplyDiscus is back online.
Thank you for your patience, understanding, and continued support of the SimplyDiscus community. We are truly sorry for the interruption and the content that was lost.
—The SimplyDiscus Administration Team
We want to provide a transparent explanation of the recent site outage and the loss of some forum content.
On July 27, a security vulnerability affecting many versions of vBulletin - the software that powers SimplyDiscus - was publicly disclosed. On July 29, our site was attacked through this vulnerability, affecting the display and uploading of images.
The site was attacked again on July 31. During this second attack, the attacker installed Monero cryptocurrency-mining software on our server, which significantly affected its performance. We immediately began cleaning and repairing the affected files, but the site was being attacked nearly as quickly as we could restore it.
To protect the forum and prevent the potential loss of additional data, we made the difficult decision on August 1 to take the website and server offline.
After reviewing our recovery options, we determined that the safest course of action was to restore the server to a backup created before the attacks began. Unfortunately, our most recent unaffected backup was from July 26. As a result, any posts, topics, images, account changes, or other forum activity made after that backup are no longer available.
We understand how frustrating and disappointing this loss is, especially for members who contributed during that time. We sincerely apologize.
We kept the site and server offline throughout the weekend while we worked to restore the system, upgrade the forum software, and apply the necessary security patch. That work has now been completed, and SimplyDiscus is back online.
Thank you for your patience, understanding, and continued support of the SimplyDiscus community. We are truly sorry for the interruption and the content that was lost.
—The SimplyDiscus Administration Team
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