Solar Panel Talk Survived the Great Hacking of 2011

[Jason]

We survived the great hacking of 2011. If you tried to log in yesterday or earlier today, you may have received an error message with a very nasty looking sign from a hacker. The hacker was able to bypass the security of inmotionhosting, our hosting company and place index files on, by some estimates, over 700,000 sites, including solarpaneltalk.com. We have now replaced these files and are back up and running and we apologize for the scare. If you see anything awry in the functionality of the site, please let us know as soon as possible. We appreciate all of the good messages we received over the past couple of days informing us about the hacking and thank you for sticking with us.

[dogsbody]

Hacking and IP addresses

If you can publish the IP addresses from which the hack came from it would help my son who is a qualified Microsoft Security (MCTS) trace the culprit(s)

I really cannot understand what these morons expect to achieve by hacking such a site dedicated to Solar Energy. It is not exactly political or religious, or even money motivated, so what exactly is the point??

[Mike90250]

The hack was against a hosting service, and not solarpaneltalk.com

700,000 sites on Inmotion Hosting Server hacked at once, it's the host's problem, nothing any of the sites hosted could do.

[Sunking]

I really cannot understand what these morons expect to achieve by hacking such a site dedicated to Solar Energy.

It is a simple attack or act of war by proxy aka Terrorism. Acts of war or terrorism comes in many forms and the most effective tactic is economics That is how Reagan won the cold war, he bankrupted the Soviet Union. Now that tactic is being used against us very effectively.

[dogsbody]

Yet the disruption is short term, so I cannot see any economic damage taking place. It is purely to annoy, and achieves nothing apart from anger

[Sunking]

Yet the disruption is short term, so I cannot see any economic damage taking place.

Then you are not seeing the big picture. Each click generates revenue, thus being OOS for 24 hours lost a lot of revenue.

[dave_in_delaware]

I had posted on the Facebook page about the hack since I wasn't sure how else to alert anyone about the problem. Is there another way to contact the site owner or a mod to alert people about a problem like this? I mean, if the entire website and forum are down?

You know, some hackers aren't politically, financially, or even "terroristically" motivated. Some just do it for the fun of it. For the challenge of it. This one probably got his jollies from knowing everyone who got his "I hacked this site" message saw his name in lights.

5 seconds of fame. Wow Mr. Hacker, I'm just so impressed. NOT.

[Jason]

Solar Panel Talk Facebook and Twitter Pages

Thank you Dave--we learned about it very early Sunday morning but it took awhile for the hosting company to offer a solution so we were down longer than we would have liked to have been. We are on both Facebook and Twitter if you feel like sending us a message. Our facebook page has changed and the page where you left your post is migrating to a new page. Thanks again for participating in this solar forum.

[klacc]

Glad to know the site has backups and are well prepared for any hacking attempts, which unfortunately seem really common now.

[Beanyboy57]

Hackers'

If you can publish the IP addresses from which the hack came from it would help my son who is a qualified Microsoft Security (MCTS) trace the culprit(s)

I really cannot understand what these morons expect to achieve by hacking such a site dedicated to Solar Energy. It is not exactly political or religious, or even money motivated, so what exactly is the point??

I think that some of these hackers are in fact the same guys that try to (forcefully) sell anti virus software to unsuspecting users. So, in effect they are creating a market that would not exist otherwise. This is why many sites get hacked regardless of their purpose or business aims.