Eccie Out Of Commission

[administrator]

Originally Posted by Fast Gunn

. . . What happened to the board?

Some tables in MySQL needed to be repaired. Sorry for the outage.

As for the other stuff brought up on this thread, my email address is st.christopher@yahoo.com. If you receive emails from other addresses, it's not me.

We don't ever send out mass emails, so you can disregard any fraudulent ones you receive.

Thanks!

St. C

[Guest020113]

lol, love your answer Eccie Addict, but by the way . . . What happened to the board? rofl

Originally Posted by Eccie Addict

My response to you had nothing to do with your question sir.... It had to do with your placement of your thread which you have a tendency to do.

Simple question...... Simple answer: The only answer I personally have to give you is a server went down.

I have a feeling that even if others came in and told you the same thing it would not suffice for you. That said feel free to continue on until you tire out or get an answer.

[Fast Gunn]

Thanks!

That is all the answer required.

I imagine that everyone on the board was naturally curious about what caused the outage.

Originally Posted by St.Christopher

Some tables in MySQL needed to be repaired. Sorry for the outage.

As for the other stuff brought up on this thread, my email address is st.christopher@yahoo.com. If you receive emails from other addresses, it's not me.

We don't ever send out mass emails, so you can disregard any fraudulent ones you receive.

Thanks!

St. C

[CuddlyBear]

I do need some help. I still can't chat. I goes to load and times out. Everything else is working fine. but I cant talk to my peeps.....plz help.....thanks
Cuddles

[mm03]

Originally Posted by Duke of G

I'd like a poll of how many ECCIE members have given money to the Nigerian Finance Ministry to claim their lost cash...

Well...it wasn't "lost" cash. But it was from the death of a relative that I didn't know that I had...a "horrendous automobile collision". It was sent on an official email letterhead and endorsed by the national bank.

I mean, what could go wrong?


mm

[blueyejef]

Originally Posted by Duke of G

Not from ECCIE, you didn't. Be wary of what you read. The spam emails circulating today ARE NOT ECCIE COMMUNICATING WITH ITS MEMBERS.

Do your due diligence. Read the whole thing. It's a spoof, and any one who fell for it needs to check their security process.

True - Eccie doesn't give out any information regarding outages, viruses, chat outages, and so on.

If you get any info about downtime, it sure didn't come from Eccie.

[LazurusLong]

As Duke noted above, there are plenty of places where emails can and most likely have been harvested.

I detest Yahoo groups for the very reason that a simple setting can hide the members but the pimps that typically set them up have no need to worry about security and allow anyone to join so when you see a group with 10K members, you can bet those have been harvested.

As noted, pay fucking attention!

I swear, for a hobby as privacy critical as this one, WAY too many players walk around with their entire world out there for everyone to look at and read in minute detail.

[coachstl]

It would be nice if ECCIE put out an alert though...especially if it's a planned update.

[LittleMiss]

I recieved an email a couple days ago, from theoriginalbecky@eccie.info saying that the site was down and "In the meantime please use our contingency site here Eccie Forums". When I clicked on that link, ECCIE FORUMS, it went to **********. Didnt know what the hell was going and and definitely thought it strange....

[Duke of G]

Originally Posted by LittleMiss

I recieved an email a couple days ago, from theoriginalbecky@eccie.info saying that the site was down and "In the meantime please use our contingency site here Eccie Forums". When I clicked on that link, ECCIE FORUMS, it went to **********. Didnt know what the hell was going and and definitely thought it strange....

This is exactly the type of behavior spammers rely on. They want people to not READ their email, and just click whatever is put in front of them.

Whatever kind of virus, malware, or other tracking you pick up is on you after that kind of mistake.

Internet Darwinism.

[LittleMiss]

all clean, but thanks! ;p

[zme]

I did not get the eccie.info emails mentioned but if I am interpreting what recipients have said accurately it seems more likely to be a phishing attack than merely spam. I inferred that the email asked people to log in to their account, presumably from a fraudulent link.
If so they may be harvesting passwords. Also from the few people who have said they received it I would guess more providers than hobbyists have received the email. That would make sense since providers email addresses are often publicly viewable.

If anyone has received an email from eccie.info asking you to click a link to log in to eccie and you did so *your eccie account is probably compromised* This is worrisome if the provider is well reviewed and verified because it means that the attacker can use the account to gain the trust and confidence of other providers/hobbyists and continue penentrating this site as well as others. And who knows what details might be present in PM's. It seems unlikely that LE would be smart enough to conduct an attack of this sophistication but I would worry about the possibility anyway. I would recommend people be cautious of unusual seeming emails even from well known people who have contacted you in the past for a little while. LittleMiss's post in particular looks very strongly like a phishing attack.

I don't know anything more about why the site went down other than what is posted here. But a DOS attack followed by a phishing attack is a very logical route of attack. And pretty likely to succeed given the widely varying technical knowledge of the user base.

Maybe it is time for someone to put up a sticky thread on "internet hygiene" to advise people on how to protect their accounts.

P.S. I would recommend that anyone who clicked on a link in an eccie.info email and typed in their password immediately go and change their password and then report the incident to a mod.

[Duke of G]

ZME: thanks for taking the time to post. The phishing element was certainly the greatest threat, and you've done a good job explaining it. I didn't take that time, and I should have.

Part of it is just frustration with the willful ignorance of some members here who can't be bothered to learn, which puts us all at risk. The internet is a great place for scams, and being savvy enough to protect yourself isn't a requirement of this site.

This hobby doesn't suffer fools. Being ignorant can cost you. So it never ceases to amaze me that members are so unprepared to use this site and the internet in general, safely. It's Internet BBFS.

I don't have time to search at the moment, but I bet that in the Security Matters forum, there are plenty of examples of proper internet security. The sad part is that those who will end up victims, won't bother to read it until it's far too late.

[Ms. Milani]

Well thank goodness I didn't click on the link that was attached to the email. But curious how they got my personal email address when I have my eccie to my escort email.

[zme]

Yes Malaya, you should be glad you did not click on the link. You probably would have donated your password to some hacker. LittleMiss, if you have read this then change your password ASAP. And if you have the misfortune of having the same exact password on any other website (like P411) that you can be easily traced to change that as well. Check the "sent" messages in your eccie mailbox and if there are any that you don't recognize your account may be being exploited by someone else. Also make sure there are no messages in your mailbox that can provide a trail for a hacker to follow to some other account you use on another site.

Again, I have no specific knowledge of why the ECCIE site failed beyond what is posted here. But from what I have seen my guess is that it was a multi-level failure of some kind. I say that because at one point the entire site was down, then the site seemed to come back up but really only the portion of it that has non database driven content was up, the database driven portion was still down. And then finally the whole site was up.
To engage in some uninformed worst case speculation I could imagine the site being subjected to a SQL injection attack that maybe penetrated the database. This could have been followed up by a DOS attack to bring the entire site down. Maybe even the hacker penetrated the server and deliberately crashed it to erase evidence of the hack. From what I have seen of how the site handles lost passwords I am guessing it does not store cleartext passwords so it is unlikely that passwords could be harvested from a compromised database. But a hacker could hypothetically subject encrypted passwords to a dictionary attack (though that seems pretty unlikely). In either case what seems highly likely to me is that after the site was down it was followed by phishing attacks to harvest passwords. It would seem to be an extraordinary coincidence that the site crashes and fake emails circulate at the exact same time.
The logical next step for a hacker would be to use harvested passwords to initiate social engineering attacks on other peoples accounts, most likely using information gathered from emails saved by the users whose accounts are compromised. These attacks would likely extend beyond the ECCIE sites to other sites that could be chosen based on emails that a user has saved. If those accounts are compromised they could in turn possibly be used to initiate attacks back on the ECCIE site. All things that a skilled and determined hacker is capable of.

Malaya, you said they used your personal email address when ECCIE email goes to your hobby email address. Have you ever sent your personal email address to another ECCIE user *by ECCIE PM*? If so it is possible for that persons account to have been compromised and then used by a hacker to get info about you. If you have received any odd messages from that person that could be part of a social engineering attack against your account.

Ultimately like Duke said, every person has to take some responsibility for your own safety. No one can protect you if you voluntarily compromise your own security. If you are unsure whether something is safe then assume it is not. And try to verify by asking questions on the boards. And *never* click on links on emails unless you have a really compelling reason to do so. I would not even assume that an email received from a mod is safe - their account could have been compromised or their email address could have been spoofed.

I realize there is a lot of paranoia in what I am saying but you are probably just a paranoid when you lock your front door when you go to the grocery store. There are far more benign explanations for the sequence of events described. But when I look into a dark alley I assume that the shadows contain criminals, not that they are empty. The internet is a dark dangerous place and only the paranoid survive.

The worst part of it is that since ECCIE is a community of mutual trust those people who don't protect their own accounts not only put themselves at risk but also other members of the community.

That is all for this long winded diatribe. Just had to get it off my chest.