Last updated: 7th February 2005, 22:26 GMT
At present
www.phpbb.com is offline due to a group of politically motivated hackers wishing to use an opensource project to push their agenda ... shame on them.
We have some possible further details of the events which led to the loss of
www.phpbb.com. Though I have not spoken with them myself I have learnt through an intermediary the group that appears to have attacked phpbb.com did indeed use a vulnerability in awstats to gain entry to our server (note that singular, we don't own a server cluster, just a server).
However, while the group who did this say they changed only a single password we have lost all access to the server. Best guess right now is that they, perhaps inadvertently, installed some incompatible applications in the process of rooting the box. This means we cannot access the system even in single user mode.
Since it would be totally inappropriate to simply "restore" we are having the box shipped from its datacenter to our server manager. There it will be analysed so we can confirm just what happened. And of course do a full reinstall after recovering the database. This will take some time. We are hoping to have an intermediate solution but there are no guarantees this is doable, or even worthwhile given the time frames. As I said before, best guesstimates for a return are from tomorrow (8th Feb) through to the end of this week.
Obviously we will confirm, as I state above, the circumstances of the attack on
www.phpbb.com just as soon as we can.
Let me say this to the "crew" that attacked phpBB. Why? We are an opensource project, we give our products away freely, we give support freely. We have enabled peoples from around the globe to communicate without restrictive licences or constant threats of action. The only thing you've done here is gain glory ... if that's what you wanted, well task achieved. But you claim to be spreading a message, a message our software has doubtless allowed others to express their opinions on. Sort of self-defeatist really, huh? Now, people who give their time freely (and no, unlike some of the commments I've read we do not rake in thousands of dollars each month!) have to clean up this mess ... time that should be spent helping users, preparing the new release, etc. By attacking our site you've indirectly affected an awful lot of people, people you claim to support. Whatever your motives, good or bad, this wasn't the best way to demonstrate them, was it?
To our community, please do not ask us for further updates as to the situation, its cause, etc. Everything we have to say is said here. Our support channel (#phpbb) on IRC has at times been swamped with "What happened? Any news?" style questions which are making it extremely difficult to support users with real issues. So we appreciate the interest but please, accept that we have nothing else to add.
Users can visit our development board, area51.phpbb.com where they can receive support for phpBB 2.0.x. Of course you can also view the next version of phpBB, 3.0 "Olympus" in the process (minus the new style of course!)
We are also maintaining our IRC support channel, #phpbb on the irc.freenode.net network
We apologise for any problems this may cause our userbase. We obviously take the huge support our community gives phpBB very seriously. And we will do our best to return to "normal operations" just as soon as we can.
psoTFX - phpBB Group