I am also glad the archive is up and running, but we have lost so much. All of the life stories, questions and answers and especially the good advice for those of us who contemplated doing something stupid. Most of the wonderful threads are gone. Should we try to rebuild what we can remember or just start over and go from here. Not crying over spilled milk, but it is sad. Whoever did this to an archive that helps so many troubled people, should be hung by his balls unlil they fall off.

Sorry for spouting off, I just feel bad that all the hard work that everyone has put into this has been lost. Steve

If it makes anyone feel better, there is a way to deal with those concerned.

In the past, a citizen (from any nation) could file a complaint with the CIA, now the method is to report to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) which is a joined amalgamation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).

You can file a complaint here (http://www.ic3.gov/). But obviously this is up to the administrators here. I would strongly recommend it, as it means those responsible will become the subjects of a criminal investigation.

Though whether you'd like to file it as a "breach of copyright" (trafficing movies via EA which is a valid complaint even though we are 'third-party' [neither the one's involved, nor the ones who had their copyright breached] ) or whether you'd simply like to report it as a hacking one I'm not sure.

I would be very interested if anyone knows the IP of any of the machines involved. I'm always looking for test subjects who have already flouted law who become fair game for me to scan their networks for fun and educational purposes!

Many thanks!!

_____________

Just a quick edit : nobody should try this, but I'm posting this purely for information purposes. One of the best tools I've found for network probing weakness detection and general scanning is NMAP available here (http://www.insecure.org/nmap/), and is illegal to use on foreign networks but very effective at it's job. It's available as a Win32 binary executable and Solaris, Linux, MacOS, Free/Open BSD and HP-UX! Very easy to use, and almost exclusively command-line driven! As all good software is!!

This program also featured in The Matrix Reloaded when Trinity used it to probe a network when shutting down the power as they tried to rescue the Keymaker!

Hairless (imported) wrote: Fri Feb 17, 2006 1:09 pm I am also glad the archive is up and running, but we have lost so much. All of the life stories, questions and answers and especially the good advice for those of us who contemplated doing something stupid. Most of the wonderful threads are gone. Should we try to rebuild what we can remember or just start over and go from here. Not crying over spilled milk, but it is sad. Whoever did this to an archive that helps so many troubled people, should be hung by his balls unlil they fall off.

Sorry for spouting off, I just feel bad that all the hard work that everyone has put into this has been lost. Steve

I think a lot of us feel violated. Thefraj has brought back a good thread he started and I think we should all contribute what was important to us. The important thing is not to let the loss of the posts and threads that as you said were important to many harm the sense of community. They got us once but we will rebuild.

NMAP is very good but you do want to be judicial in it's use just in case someone at your ISP notices a full port beating to another address.

tal

I'm upset about what happened to EA too, and we have lost a small part of our history. But all the wonderful people I've been lucky enough to meet are still here. Past conversations can be lost, but nobody can destroy this wonderful (and supportive!) community that has been around for many more years. And I hope we can continue to share our experiences, seek advice and argue over petty political differences in the same way we always have!

In short, we can continue to be the wonderful community we have always been! Nothing important has changed, we just can't see some of the older threads. But we will write more history as we continue and in a few months, we will look back at this event as nothing more than a bump in the road.

Out with the old and in with the new, what else can you do? Firewall the zoo with barbed-wire and... glue (bad rhyme)... and run backups too?

This site is more virtual than the internet, it lives in spirit.

DocT

I feel my real concern is that if someone has deliberately wiped out the past 4 months then what protection do we have against another attack wiping out new posts again - or destroying even more of the back archive??

Most worrying, apart from some excellent lost threads is the loss of the most recent members. I hope they all realise that damage has been aimed at the site and all of us and that no-one has been expelled here. Please re-register if your membership has disappeared. Hackers shouldn't stop us from 'being here', from "our own space". I agree, let's hope this was just a 'bump in the road' and that there has been some resurfacing!

Hackers -- and I'm not just referring to those who attacked the Eunuch Archive -- are in my view total assholes, and one can't surrender to them. The response is for all members of the EA family to respond by rebuilding through resurrection of old posts, new posts, new stories, re-registering, etc.

Incidentally, I regard hackers -- like graffiti sprayers -- as motivated by a male-dog-peeing-on-every-lamppost testosterone-driven need to assert their male presence. Another good argument for castration as something that (I fantasize here) males will voluntarily undergo so as to control the antisocial urges generated by their testes!

Sac_Mec,

The loss came from VBulletin's user-hostile backup system.

In this age of technology, you'd think someone could write a simple backup/restore routine. Obviously not. It could have been much worse, though. Only the VBulletin areas of the vast Archive structure were affected.