The Marple Website Forum & Noticeboard

Update Monday 28th April
Latest news is that the board has been successfully upgraded from version 3.1.1 to 3.1.2a. This is the first step in a series of upgrades to get to version 3.1.5, which is supposed to be safe from attack. So far so good but the next upgrade involves changes to the database, so will be more complex.

Sunday 27th April 2008
On the morning of Sunday 27th April the Marple Website Forum & Noticeboard was subject to an extreme hacker attack. The board was taken over and the most graphic and disgusting images I have even seen were posted in every thread. Thankfully I was notified very quickly and was able to shut the board down before too many people (I hope) saw them. I cannot exaggerate how awful these images were and I apologise to anyone who saw them.

At first I thought this was an attack targeted at the Marple Website, although I knew no reason why someone would do this. However, I have now established that it was more widespread that just our own forum and it has effected many similar boards running the same Ikonboard software that we were using. There has obviously been a new vulnerability discovered that led to a systematic attack across the Internet.

Our web provider has been very helpful and was quite quickly able to restore the forum to its state as of Saturday night but I am not prepared to enable the board again until I can be certain that the attack cannot be repeated as I am not prepared to risk anyone seeing the filth that was posted again.

Currently I am waiting for feedback through the Ikonboard support forum but it may take a few days before this is forthcoming as this appears to be a new attack that was only begun today and they don't seem to know much about it at the moment.

It does look possible that we might have to start all over again with a new forum system as the upgrade path to take the version we were using up to the latest release is pretty horrendous and I don't know yet if that will prevent a repeat attack. I need time to evaluate this as I don't want to loose all our existing members and posts and start from scratch unless it is unavoidable.

For the moment I've put a diversion in place that routes forum users to the main site and you can come to this page for the latest news.

Thank you to everyone who has been in touch about the board being down already and a special thank you to those of you who warned me so quickly about the attack. I hope you will all continue to support the Marple Website while we get through this problem and will help us to make it even better once a solution is in place.