A message from Tom Allensworth at Avsim as relayed from SimFlight:



source: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=76173&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Sad indeed. Nobody deserves that and there's never anything funny about it. Whoever is responsible is a real credit to the human genome.

When they come back I'll donate them a few bucks. Never did, albeit my downloads more and more switched from flightsim.com over to avsim.com, and stuff like this shows what a large amount of work it was.

Surprised though that they can't simple recover from tape or other offline backup to a status a week or two earlier. A hacker should not be able to target off-site files, and any good web hoster will have that kind of safety net.

Tom stated that they backed up their data "between servers". Not a good thing to do and I am sure they are regretting that strategy now. Hopefully they'll still be able to recover something despite this.

I've done that too in the past, but with a weekly "to external USB drive" strategy as an added failsafe. Slightly surprised to see that such a professional website had ZERO offline backup.

I found it very surprising they have (had) no offline backup scheme... especially with the amount of data they probably had on their server. There are some very affordable backup options these days, so not reason not to have that.

Hi,

Day of infamy

Temporary forum:

http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/index.php

OFF

A number of users, including myself, were commenting on spam we received on behalf of First Class Simulations (some store). The topic was started because it was unsolicited email and seemed to involve email addresses which had never been used anywhere but Avsim. A few were accusing Avsim, and some of the staff were denying/condemning it. Well it seems they were completely oblivious to it.

Prior to the incident with the spam, Avsim had contracted a guy by the name of Phil Dawson who has ties to SimFly (and the beneficiary of the spam). Apparently he was to make some "changes" to their servers (with root admin access) to unify the file library and forums under a shared username/password schema, perform optimizations, etc. What Avsim wasn't made aware of was that he had harvested untold numbers of email addresses, without permission, and proceeded to use them immediately. Whether he profited from them or not is irrelevant, as he violated the laws of any number of countries in not only acquiring them, but subsequently disseminating the data. God knows what else he got his hands on.

This individual was forthwith fired. Low any behold the site goes down. Coincidence? Maybe. Avsim is looking into tracing the logs, but given their apparent poor backup standards, maybe they'll never be able to prove it.

If you have any shared usernames/passwords that you used at Avsim, and you use them in other venues, you might want to change them. I can only assume that since he was actually working on a system to unify those data, he must have had access to more than email addresses.

I guess once again we have see the reason why to - BACK THAT THANG UP!

Sorry for your loss! A bunch of smart, mean and bored people out there.

I just came to say I can't believe they backed up one server to another and vice versa. As a network engineering student, that is just idiotic to say the least. They pretty much made themselves extremely vulnerable and/or were very arrogant not to have tape backups or backups to an offline machine at the very least. God... idiots.

Well this just sucks. A lot of hard work by many hundreds, if not thousands of people over the years is now gone. I would guess that for many of the files that were on that site, there is no other copy out there. As an avid FS2004/FSX player, this was not a good thing to see.

WOW..blast from the past...my sig still shows my old title here on SimHQ...removed the sig. (Junior member..LOL...I have ID #2 on the boards I believe.)

RJL

"Smart mean and bored" is a good name for a band

Weird. Around May 12th one of my computers got a virus and the other just turned off and wouldn't come back on. I spent the last 4 or 5 days trying to get one of them working again. Ended up putting the 2nd hard drive for storage on the virus infected one and installing XP again without reformatting. Any suggestions on a new place for my scripts and profiles?