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Avsim Destroyed!!

Nice,I,ve just learned how to upload correctly at AVSIM and now it,s all over..Can,t they just start out from scratch ? I can reuplod my files in heartbeat and probably so most of the authors.
There is no protection against this kind of attacks ? It seems unreal to me, that so much work
can be whipped out so easily.The scary thought that who did this can destroy the whole FS community by taking out our main library websites.If the story is true.But AVSIM had problems for weeks now with their library,down most of the time,then up for brif moments..Hmmm , and suddently a hacker came and finished them off for good...It could be..I don,t know.I think they just gave up.Regardless of what happend i want to thank AVSIM team for all the years of service to FS community and wish you all the best in your future endeavors !
 
jmig said:
I hope that the idea of Karma is in reality a fact.

May they reap what they sow.
Click to expand...

OH She is a wonderful Lady reset assured there will be a price to be paid.

aeroscout said:
Thats ok has anyone tried to get into flightsim.com? getting the samemsg as Avsim:blind:
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No problems here at Flightsim.com but I can not dl files on my other pc. I am not sure why but this one is fine so I don't really care what its problem is.
 
It is a black day for everyone when one of the top sites is destroyed in this way. I have posted a message of condolence and support on their temporary forum. I think that the more people that do this will give Tom and his staff the heart to try to rebuild.
 
I mentioned I'm ready when they pass the collection plate around. I sincerely hope Tom will rebuild.

Bob
 
OWCH!

This one hurt.

The developer community is seriously harmed here. Not only are tools and knowledge lost, but uploads by freeware designers are gone. This is planes and liveries, airports and terrain, as well as the tools to create these items... all lost. Especially harmed are the older sims, as content is lost that may not be regained.

Just when it seems little else can go wrong with the world...

Dick
 
Canelo_Kid said:
The SOH servers failed just like AVSIM!

Even though we haven't said anything public we believe we were hacked. As with AVSIM both our main and backup drives were corrupted and unreadable. Before doing anything ourselves we had professionals try to recover the drives and fortunately they were able to recover part of the data.
Click to expand...

Ickie's post sounded like SOH was DDOS attacked, can that cause damage to the servers or was this the work of a skilled hacker?
 
it was a directed attack, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, these hackers know if they can fill up the swap drive with millions of request the server will burn up trying to fulfill these requests, when the swap drive gets full the server has to rid itself of these, in doing so it corrupts the drives. our server is now 4 years old and the MB just could not hold up.

a hacking just puts code or changes your pages, either way you have to reformat because you cannot find all the hidden code left behind.
 
.........sad sad days

...........a certain amount of our IRE and AGRESSION should be aimed at M$SOFT for allowing an operating system where a primary or secondary partition can be destroyed so easy.
....all primary partitions should be protected with BLOWFISH or RIJNDAEL as standard
....a bog standard bootini virus or polymorph worm will destroy tables on a hardrive (happened to me a cupla times) and had to extract files one ot a time (10GB plus is a lot of damn work ,so the idea of what AVSIM would have to do is enomous
...............i say compost em
 
I am going to bet that is not an Microsoft issue egypt. For running forums... most site use Linux. I am sure the SOH admins can answer for this site but I know Avsim is a not MS setup.

Now...

To quote a famous expression:
'What in the wide wide world of sports is goin on here!!'


The flightsim community is taking a beating this year! First the Aces news and now the fan websites are being attacked and brought down!!

Lets face it folks.... a bad bad year for our favorite hobby.

The loss of Avsim is huuuge!! Tom and company have done such a great job of hosting the conventions and bringing fans and developers together! I am angry to hear of the attack and these things happening to good people. There and of course here at our own home.

For those saying well we have to start posting again.. yes not too big of a hit.

However the developer threads... modeling,scenery,weather.....anything SDK related... is lost! All that ruminating and troubleshooting gone. These hackers have destroyed intellectual property!! Putting a monetary value to it... as I am sure some here know... would be extremely high... all of that work put in by developers to find something new or fix a bug. Gone!

Not to mention the libraries! Everyone is effected by that as one less place to go for our favorite downloads.

Scarier as Rhumba notes.... there is FS98, CFS1 and CFS2 files never to be replaced... it's been too long ago... don't think I even have my original PHP1 release that we uploaded to Avsim in 2001. I can rebuild our Task Force 16 scenery for FS9 ... I think. Man I have to go back and relearn platforms for FS9 SDK for carrier decks.

Our community is being destroyed!

If not by the economy (Aces) then by malicious hackers attacking the very places where we come to meet and hang together!

Sad...angry... shocked.

A bad year for FS.

To use another saying that is bandied about nowdays.....


Hopefully we have hit bottom.
 
if someone can contact them at avsim, tell them I will give them a hand if they want it.
 
Does anyone has an idea who these hackers are? I can't imagine that somebody actually ruins other men's work just for fun. :isadizzy:

Huub
 
Sad state of affairs....

You'd think that with the advancement of technology, there would be the appreciation of other folk's efforts to provide the resources and access for all instead of this kind of empty-headed behavior.
 
huub vink said:
Does anyone has an idea who these hackers are? I can't imagine that somebody actually ruins other men's work just for fun. :isadizzy:

Huub
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Huub look two or three posts above you someone pointed the way to a thread that discusses it. ROR

Dangerousdave26 said:
Of course that would be for the courts to decide but read here.

http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=41
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I know nobody reads the posts in the thread once it goes past two pages. :icon_lol:
 
crashaz said:
However the developer threads... modeling,scenery,weather.....anything SDK related... is lost! All that ruminating and troubleshooting gone. These hackers have destroyed intellectual property!! Putting a monetary value to it... as I am sure some here know... would be extremely high... all of that work put in by developers to find something new or fix a bug. Gone!
Click to expand...

Precisely! The loss of 12 years worth of accumulated wisdom in just the "Aircraft and Panel Design" forum alone is a tragedy. There's hardly a day over the past 10 years I haven't spent time researching something modeling or gauge programming related there...

Many of the people who contributed the most to the knowledge base are now beyond caring about mundane, earthly things, having earned their :engel016:...

One such individual was Ron Friemuth, who was one of only a scant handful who'd managed to truly crack the arcane secrets of the FDE (.air file). All of his contributions are now :pop4:
 
First off, I want to correct one thing Ron Hamilton mentioned- these websites aren't competitors, their part of a family.

This is clearly an act of terrorism and should be treated as such. I'm sure the FBI should be involved in this. I hope they fry the responsible individual(s) responsible.

Please let Tom know that we are all with him and if there is anything that we can do, pleasea don't hesitate to let us know.
 
I agree Bill...someone over there was saying that the library was all-important, but most of what was in the library is still out there, distributed amongst the thousands of users' computers, waiting to be re-collected. There is no record of the thousands of conversations that have been key to solving so many problems.

I do have to say that I'm stunned that there was no offline backup. I would have hoped that losing the AvHistory.org forums and all those precious postings on the inner working of the FDE by Ron Freimuth and others would have highlighted the enduring importance of those discussions enough to keep a safe archive somewhere. Hopefully, we'll be able to get some or all of it back with some fancy disk forensics.

Tom hired a new guy to build a new library system, gave him root access, and soon thereafter discovered that the AVSIM forum's e-mail database had been harvested to send spam ads from another one of his sites. They fired him, and then hours later, AVSIM gets vaporized just as they're bringing the new system online. I'm sure the two are unrelated...

Bob Scott
Colonel, USAF (ret)
ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V
Colorado Springs, CO
 
"First off, I want to correct one thing Ron Hamilton mentioned- these websites aren't competitors, their part of a family."

Railrunner:

To clarify, I received the email from Tom last evening asking to assist in getting the news out.

I quoted Tom exactly. If you reread the message you will note that Tom was referring to Francois and Nels.

I do happen to know that the three parties mentioned have recently buried the hatchet and a quick look at Simflight.com and Flightsim.com will confirm this for you. :mixedsmi:
 
As a developer and long time user of the Avsim forums for many years I am stunned at the incredible amount of knowledge that the development community has lost. Bill's observation that many of those knowledge sources are no longer with us makes it that much harder to comprehend...truly a sad day here! :frown:

The saddest part has to do with the saga that appears to be unfolding regarding the responsible party...and as much as I try to avoid this sort of thing any of you guys that were there in the last few days might know what I am talking about. I watched it evolve in the Hanger forum before Avsim was killed. Wade through the link that Dangerousdave provided above...:eek:
 
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