pente.org was gone. On February 14th, 2014, a malevolent hacker or intelligence agency thought it was a good idea to break in the server pool where pente.org was hosted and erase everything. Not just Pente.org, but a number of other websites as well, together with all the backups.
I still had a backup and a backup of the database which dated back to January 14th, 2014, which means that - all the games you played after that date are gone, - all the ongoing games from that date will have timed out, - and if you registered after that date, you will have to re-register your account.
Message was edited by: rainwolf at Feb 15, 2014 5:37 PM To all of you who lost hard earned points, my sincere apologies. I will be more diligent with backups in the future and make them weekly at least.
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 16, 2014, 3:06 AM
Thank the Lord it's back- I was really going to miss playing the computer version of my favorite board game here(imagine my shock when I tried to log in yesterday & saw the bad news posted!).
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 16, 2014, 9:16 PM
Thanks for your diligent work to keep the site running. We all appreciate it. It may be a "brave, new world" but I, frankly, find all this hacking and spying very unsettling.
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 17, 2014, 10:31 AM
Thank all of you for the kind words, I wasn't sure it was possible at all, but I'm glad it worked. I will move pente.org one more time to a beast of a server, with the latest and the greatest and in a matter of week(s).
And I'm keeping my fingers' crossed for some peace and quiet, aside from a gently purring server, after that
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 18, 2014, 9:59 AM
Hi Xenophon, Sadly there's no way, no time, no resources, to find out who. And as for holes, I should have covered a bunch by reinstalling a new server from scratch, the old one was the same original server pente.org was on for years. I think we're good now, and shouldn't have to fear another hack anytime soon.
Posts:
35
Registered:
Mar 3, 2009
From:
Central Texas
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 25, 2014, 8:11 AM
Yeah!! -- in my opinion Rainwolf DOES rock!!
in fact... despite being effectively a functional noobie around here, it has stymied me as to why there appears to be so little support in the way of shekels (contributions) for supporting Walied with his demonstrated commitment to providing maintenance of our cherished game venue. (or mine anyway
...i dunno'... it just doesn't compute! (??)
oh well... I did in fact hear from a close family member (a super-geekoid) that there had been a significant Valentine's_Day hack-attack on several game_server-hosts in the region. -- and yes, apparently there were a number of other websites who were decimated as well.
... i've been digital for close to 3 decades myself. - i can tell you that it's a lot of work to keep things up & running. -- rainwolf is carrying a burden that some of us just simply don't understand.
Re: Valentine's hack
Posted:
Feb 28, 2014, 11:29 AM
Thank you cfisch and kriswithak for the kind words
Starting yesterday, the database is automatically backup-ed every day at 9am CET (that's midnight in California), and stored on dropbox. The most we'll lose in the event of another hack is merely a day's worth of moves, at most.
This should help everyone, especially me, sleep a little easier
