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Zerabira
Joined: 01 May 2006
Posts: 105
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 Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:01 pm Post subject: Legal recourse against website hackers? |
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In the past I have had some problems with "hackers" or more likely script kiddies. When it happens it can take days of work to secure and restore things. What kind of action can be taken against people who basically vandalise your property and who can you report it to? I couldn't imagine going to the police and saying "my forum got hacked". But this is a real problem and can cause a serious loss of money and time.
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seo
Joined: 16 Mar 2006
Posts: 1999
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| Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:12 pm Post subject: |
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| Zerabira wrote: | | In the past I have had some problems with "hackers" or more likely script kiddies. When it happens it can take days of work to secure and restore things. What kind of action can be taken against people who basically vandalise your property and who can you report it to? I couldn't imagine going to the police and saying "my forum got hacked". But this is a real problem and can cause a serious loss of money and time. |
You can report it to authorities like FBI, and they're supposed to investigate incidents like that and take necessary actions on hackers.
I personally think that you're wasting your time unfortunately. My board got hacked a couple of times in the past, but I never took any action to take someone responsible.
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aboyd
Joined: 05 Jul 2006
Posts: 20
Location: USA
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| Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 3:45 am Post subject: |
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| seo wrote: | You can report it to authorities like FBI, and they're supposed to investigate incidents like that and take necessary actions on hackers.
I personally think that you're wasting your time unfortunately. |
Correct. When I worked for Actuate Software, our servers were hacked by our competitors. I use "hacked" loosely -- the server wasn't very secure, and I had been begging my boss for someone to help out. But anyway, they hacked us good, called our clients, all sorts of stuff. We called the FBI. They did in fact show up. They asked a lot of hard questions about how we could have been stupid enough to get hacked.
Then they asked the big one. "How much money has this hacking attempt cost the company?" I thought about it, and said, "maybe $10,000 in salaries of people who had to sort it out, clean it, and so on." And he packed up his briefcase, patted me on the head (not really, but you get the idea), and he told me to call him when losses were in the 6 or 7 figure range.
So, ouch. He was really helpful, but agents will not spend their own high salaries to recover or protect you... at least not until you are a very, very wealthy businessman, losing huge sums of money.
-Tony
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Zerabira
Joined: 01 May 2006
Posts: 105
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| Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 11:25 am Post subject: |
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It looks like there's no chance for small site owners then. The police don't seem to be tooled up for this kind of job, at least not in significant enough numbers. The thing is, I take someone vandalizing a site I put months of work into just as seriously as if they had vandalized some of my physical personal property, it's just as important to me. There's got to be a change eventually.
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seo
Joined: 16 Mar 2006
Posts: 1999
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| Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Zerabira wrote: | | It looks like there's no chance for small site owners then. The police don't seem to be tooled up for this kind of job, at least not in significant enough numbers. The thing is, I take someone vandalizing a site I put months of work into just as seriously as if they had vandalized some of my physical personal property, it's just as important to me. There's got to be a change eventually. |
Backup, backup, backup. The most important security measure to take.
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aboyd
Joined: 05 Jul 2006
Posts: 20
Location: USA
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| Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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| seo wrote: | | Backup, backup, backup. The most important security measure to take. |
Fully agreed. Just a couple of hours ago, I was visiting my sites sorta as a routine check, and one of my sites had some PHP error messages appearing right on the page. That shouldn't happen, and I know what causes it -- the step57 hack.
So I log into my server, find the forum cache folder, upload the backup of the cache files, make permissions a little more restrictive, and done. Problem solved in 5 minutes.
(Of course, it took about 5 hours of researching the step57 hack last month for me to be so aware of it & how to fix it, but the point about backups remains -- if you have recent backups, you can undo the damage pretty fast.)
-Tony
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Camron
Joined: 14 Jul 2006
Posts: 110
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| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 11:20 pm Post subject: |
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| man some people are just sooo stupid! |
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