Thanks.

bojster · Post by **bojster** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:59 pm

I just want to thanks Holger for keeping the phpBB engine up-to-date, which delivered us from suffering the same fate as 40000 other forums whose admins weren't too concerned with security, including one (fortunately only one) on which I am/was active and which lost 1,5 month worth of posts and users (BTW, after I informed the admin that he should update the engine asap, it was destroyed again this morning; some people never learn). For those not knowing what I'm talking about: some worm destroyed a great many phpBB-based forum sites by exploiting a security hole in vulnerable versions.
Just in case, I hope you also remember about making/keeping the security backup...
So... Thanks, Holger :-)

Post by **Holger** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 5:21 pm

Always at your service... ;-)

And yes: This is a *really* nasty worm: It automatically uses Google to search for phpBB forums on the web and then tries to infect them. So it can spread quite fast...

Fortunately, I had already updated the phpBB software to the current version, which hopefully does not contain more such bugs and vulnerabilities... PHP is a bit critical in that regard... :-/

bojster · Post by **bojster** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:19 pm

Holger wrote:It automatically uses Google to search for phpBB forums on the web and then tries to infect them.

Not any more, Google is now blocking the worm queries. Let's hope they're efficient in that.

Post by **Holger** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:30 pm

Yup, right. But I think that it already got nearly all relevant phpBB forums on the web before Google blocked it. Those which were not indexed by Google probably did not have much content anyway...

bojster · Post by **bojster** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 8:58 pm

True, though it's really optimistic that only 40000 out of like 3M or more phpBB forums' engines weren't updated ;-)
Also I have absolutely no idea where that post of mine containing two quotations came from. Could you delete it? I'm not able to do that after someone posts a reply.

Post by **Holger** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:36 pm

> True, though it's really optimistic that only 40000 out of like 3M or more phpBB forums'
> engines weren't updated ;-)

That's right (now that I think about it ;-) ). Probably the rest are really a lot less popular and therefore not ranked on one of the first Google result pages. (And maybe that worm just sequentially tries the Google results from start, so it may take a lot of time to go through the first ~40.000 phpBB results...)

> Also I have absolutely no idea where that post of mine containing two quotations came from.

Strange indeed...

> Could you delete it?

Yup, done.

Zomis · Post by **Zomis** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:20 pm

Holger wrote:That's right (now that I think about it ). Probably the rest are really a lot less popular and therefore not ranked on one of the first Google result pages.

I dunno how mine could be listed there, since it has only 18 users and 148 posts....

Thanks for info about this worm though, didn't heard of it before actually...