Dav Waldron's Blog

So my favourite place on the internet, which also happens to be the place I work, Boards.ie, has been hacked this morning.  Here’s our official word:

Fellow Boards Members,

Today, Thursday 21 Jan 2009 at 11:20 GMT the Boards.ie database was attacked by a source external to Ireland. This triggered our security response policy and as a result we are sending you this warning email.

In this attack, part of the database which includes our members usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords was accessed. While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords.

We also recommend that if you used the same username/email and password on other sites that you change your password there too as a precaution.

What happened:

• This morning our database server was accessed by an unauthorised source.
• We discovered this intrusion and took the site offline.
• As a precaution We contacted the Gardaí, the Data Protection Commissioner and an independent security consultancy.
• We have followed the advice we have received on how to proceed.
• Like all large sites we are regularly the target for disruption and take continual actions to proactively protect your data.  This particular attack was completely unprecedented despite our rigorous security measures and while we have no idea if this data will be used for any malicious reasons, we felt it vital to tell you this immediately.

What you need to know and do:

• If you use the same password on Boards as you do on other services, you should change it on those other services to be safe. Boards passwords are NOT stored in plain text, they are obscured with the standard vBulletin “Hash”. While this provides strong protection, we have altered all passwords on Boards as a precaution and suggest you take this time to allter other similar passwords.
• If you are a subscriber, please be assured, we do NOT store credit card details or any payment details on our servers. Nothing of that nature is held on our site and as a result such data was not compromised.
• We apologise for this inconvenience. We do not want to over stress the problem, however we felt the situation requires full disclosure.

Tom Murphy.

Things to check out:

Boards.ie on Twitter

So there you have it.  It’s been a rather frantic day of writing emails, ringing security people, talking with press people, figuring out the best way to email nearly 300k members, etc, etc.  I can’t even imagine what a day Conor and Ross on our tech team have had, and whilst my own technical knowledge is limited, the scope of this is huge – we have to change everyone’s password and at the same time, perform a forensic analysis on what’s happened.  It’ll be a long night ahead for the guys.

I just want to say a thank you to everyone for their good wishes and support and to those who’ve helped us out over the last few hours of stress.  There’s a long night ahead yet…

Dav

I changed themes cause the old one wasn’t that easy to read.  This one’s not quite right, but I’ll get around to tweaking it sooner or later.

That’s all for now…

Well I survived another trip to Mayo this weekend

Everything is more or less as I left it. The only major news is the trouble my old employers Lynch Hotels are having some difficulties. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke than Michael Lynch Jr – he did’t appear to me to have a grasp about what we needed in Breaffy House and insisted we provide second rate service due to ever spiralling demands to reduce costs.  He also told the GM to sack me cause I have long hair which, as you can imagine, went down *very well* when I was told to go home any time he arrived at the hotel.

But enough of the misery, there’s enough misery around without me needing to expand on it.

I went home to surprise my mother for her birthday. Got down and headed to the house knowing she wasn’t there and proceeded to load photos onto the digital photoframe I got for her.  This was my first time seeing my brother since he cut his hair – his used to be longer than mine and he’s had it long for a few years more than me.  Long story short, he won a voucher to get his hair cut and he said “fuck it, I may as well” and it really suits him.

Decided to go find some of my friends and caught up with them.  Played some pool which is always fun (and better when your friends have a table in their house).  Ended up being a late night falling asleep watching Watchmen which a few of them hadn’t seen yet (yes, I know, hard to believe I have non-nerd friends who weren’t foaming at the mouth to see this).  General consensus was poor.  General craic was good though.

Saturday, I awoke, had a cuppa tea and wandered home stopping to collect some new albums from another friend.  Then I spent the rest of Saturday chilled out. I watched some telly and read some Games Workshop stuff.

Sunday I went visiting family.  Some of my cousins have children and they’re all good.  It’s sometimes fun to interact with kids – I use it as a measure of how grown up I am  The harder it is to understand what they’re up to, the older I am. Ruaidhrí and Angela’s eldest, Oscar (who’s fast approaching 4 I think) is a total head-the-ball and daft as a brush, but great craic.  He’s all about wrestling and jumping on or at you.  It’s strange, but do sometimes feel like I’m missing out on something by not really knowing that gang of kids (Danny & Beth have 3 and Ro and Angela have 2), but they all remember who I am which pleases me greatly.

Got a lift back up to Dublin with one of the family which is always better than a train and lashed into some Xbox with some mates until WAY too late.

Good weekend all round though.

Moon Phases widget – this pleases Dav.

Look at my shiney new theme, isn’t it lovely? It matches the rest of the site (not that the rest of the site has much in it, but it might some day).  I’m chuffed that I finally got that sorted, it was annoying me.

Now I have no more excuses to make this blog thing work.