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…

So it seems, contrary to popular belief, that Santy thinks I have been a good boy this year. I have received from him 2 most wonderful new toys which move my plans to unleash horrific music upon the world even closer to reality.

Tosh and Pod - a double act to be frightened of...

So what is it?

Well it’s a Toshiba Satellite LD350 – 214 which boasts an Athlon Dual Core CPU, 2 GB of RAM (soon to be upgraded to 4GB when I have some spare cash), 250GB hard drive and a 17″ screen! So it’s “portable desktop” rather than “laptop” territory which is great as I need to be able to take it to and from practice etc.

On top of that we have the Line 6 Pod X3. This is a guitar (and vocal!) multi-effects processing unit that can replicate the sound of many different amps, cabs, microphones and of course, effects units. It also acts as a MIDI device when connected via USB into a computer and after some fiddling around with stuff this afternoon, I managed to get it correctly installed on the Tosh.

Next remaining step is to install some manner of recording software and learning how the frak the Pod works I also need to get some manner of backpack or bag to carry both devices, their power supplies, cables, etc. Have had a few recommendations already in that regard, so no worries.

My current problems are two-fold:
1) my flat is WAY too small to set this stuff up in it.
2) my decent guitars are all out in storage since the closure of the BatCave.

So I’d already planned on moving house anyway, so that’s grand, all that remains is getting to the storage place and grabbing my axes.

Fun times ahead