BlenderNation Hacked, Back

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hacked.pngLast night we started receiving reports of spam links appearing under each page on BlenderNation. Investigation showed that a number of files had been compromised, probably because of our WordPress installation being out of date. As I was in bad need of some sleep, my ISP and I decided to shut down the site for the night, and fix things in the morning.

Today I cleaned the entire site and performed a WordPres upgrade. The only function that didn’t work after the upgrade is the Event Calendar. I’ll look into this, but I think it’ll be offline for a while. Before I put too much time into it, I do wonder though: how many people actually use the calendar? Do you need it back?

A final note: if you have a registered account here, it’s a wise precaution to change your password.

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    • BrianT

      Is that new baby of yours keeping you from sleep? Good to have BN back up!

    • ccherrett

      Bart. I do not use the calendar

    • Brian

      I don’t use the Calendar. Get some rest Bart.

    • http://membres.lycos.fr/bobois/index_anglais.html IamInnocent

      I do use it but it isn’t a necessity for the time being. Glad to see the site back.
      Live well young fellow and you two young parents of young fellow Mathias.

      J.

    • http://www.blenderjobs.com Dennis

      good grief…some people just have too much time on their hands, and have nothing better to do than destroy honest peoples work. my site was (2 of my domains, actually) got hacked. cleaning everything up, patching, giving thought to the backups one should have done ;-) and so on are a real pain.

      thumbs up for getting the site up and running so fast!

      ps. i dont use the calendar either…

    • terence

      I don’t use the calendar, I’m just addicted to the rest of the site. Keep up the good work

    • http://thinningpictures.googlepages.com/ LoMac

      I’ve probably only seen the calender once. Good recovery!

    • Teatime

      …what calendar?

    • Jean_R

      so fast recovery :)

    • Felix_Kütt

      good to see you guys back!! :)

    • DJ Tull

      I see the calendar often, but there are very rarely events in the UK where I am. I don’t think it’s something you really ‘use’ so much as something that you notice one day and think, “Wow, there’s a Blender meet down the road!” if you get my drift. From that perspective it’s useful, but I don’t think anyone’s going to be sobbing if it goes ;)

      Thanks for the hard work!

    • Tynach

      The message said it would be up on Sunday!!! Glad it didn’t take that long!

      No, I don’t use the calender, but now that I know about it, I might.

    • SummerRider

      I don’t use the Calendar

    • http://www.kuehberger.net/blender carlinhos

      I have seen the calendar once, actually I don’t need it.

    • Igor

      I never used calendar. Make some good backup instead. :)

    • Höhrer

      I like the calendar, even if more than 95% of the events do not concern me directly. It’s good to have an overview over all those Blender events around the world – and quite some events have cool websites as well :D
      Also: As DJ Tull mentioned already … maybe there is one of those events down your road when you least expect it.
      That doesn’t mean I/we can’t live without it for some time ;)

      Werner

    • http://www.alienhelpdesk.com macouno

      I rather like the calendar… it’s a very practical thing to check a date on, even though I rarely actually need it.

    • MFX

      I’ve wondered about strange links in the article about the “car model repository”. Maybe I should have posted this topic in a different way.

    • http://www.cuby.co.nr Cuby

      I’ve never used the calendar before, in fact I never knew there was one.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @MFX: are you still seeing strange links? If so, please provide a URL.

      Cheers,

      Bart

    • Carrot.nl

      I don’t use the Calendar.

    • Daerd

      If it’s too much work, I think I’d just have to let you know that I don’t use it. But if otherwise, it’s a handy thing to have. :)

    • http://e2-productions.com Dion Moult

      never heard of a calendar before.

    • Iconoclast

      wut’s a calender?

      Thanks, for the heads up about the hacked site, you think someone would trace back the ads and hack back the company that they promoted.

      Speaking of, what products was this pushing?

      *Also, I’m not lurking in the shadows as much, so it’s nice to informally introduce myself.*

    • CorsairX

      Don’t use the calendar (not much around here), but do like it – I wonder if it’d be possible to extend it for community events as well as training and major events?

    • phexitol

      They were mostly promoting drugs, and were hosted on a college server FFS! I wonder if their admin fixed things as quickly as Bart and co did here?

    • Bob

      I had a site for about 2 years (about 80,000 hits altogether and for a while typing in the site name would get you hit 1 from Google). I would get attempted hacks about every 5 minutes. Mostly I ignored things (I did keep site security fairly tight), and block IP addresses where the spam would originate from (although I usually suspected they were from a hijacked machine or a war-driven open wifi connection or something ‘encrypted’ with the very open and crackable wep protocol). Eventually with enough attempts and SQL injection, they managed to break into the site. I locked the site down for a few weeks, but it was a pain to have a very locked site (very read only, little viewer feedback). I would have to replace a lot of the software and so decided to take it down (I had time for maintenance, but not a site rebuild). Good work on rebuilding though. Even the Blender homepage depends on Blender Nation for news.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @CorsairX: certrainly. We also include things such as community challenges etc.

    • http://www.lrb.wep.dk Lasphere

      Hey bart. Im addicted to the news, not the calendar. I dont think ive ever used it. :) Great recovery, thought it was kinda anoying with those ads. :)

      See ya.

    • alabandit

      i like the calender but as mention before…there not much that affect my era eather (south Africa). thou the comment to extend the calendar to “training and major events” and other events related to blender woul be cool…

      but from me, theres no pressure toget it back up

    • phexitol

      Well, it looks like the college site is still hacked :(

      In fact, yikes! Alot of college servers have been hacked in the same way :(

      Check this by Googling for “site:.edu xanax”. If you see your college/school in the hits, let the IT dept know.

    • http://www.mumeli.org/en/ Serge Gielkens

      Never used the calender.

    • funktioncurve

      I dont use the Calender get some rest bud

    • MFX

      @Bart: no strange links anymore

    • http://advanced-lemon.blogspot.com/ epat

      Ah well… if you host a popular site, you gotta expect to get it hacked once in a while! Still, the people that do this sorta thing; they can’t seriously expect people to buy drugs from some dodgy ad!! The sort of people these things are aimed at are morons – I mean, come on, they’re not exactly the kind of users that Blender attracts!! As for the calendar, well I never used it anyway! ;)

      ~epat. :)

    • http://barbatron.com barbatron

      even didn’t knew there was a calendar..

      But I don’t think it’s a necessity ( do you write it like this ? )