Official Statement from LWG

[bmckain]

I hope this is not out of line but we have been being flooded with question about LWG. Now that we have had time to research the situation I felt it was time to let the 3D Community know what’s up.

As of sometime around 3 to 4 am on 07/07/03 LWG3D was attacked by a hacker. The attack was initiated through web based tools associated with our Virtual Server. They were able to use our files from our internal code to determine a way to hack Firedragon through a Web Dameon as well.

The bottom line is that the entire Webpipe server was wiped clean and many files on Firedragon were lost. We did however catch the culprit in the process of deleting files from the Firedragon server and pulled the internet connection on them. We were able to gain some information from this and that is still being researched by the guys at Webpipe. We do have backups of Firedragon though a few files will still be lost however we were not so fortunate with the Webpipe server. Through a communication error no backups were being done on the main site. This is unfortunate because at the very least we have lost around a year of history in the database.

Due to this complication, the restoration of LWG is going to take a few days to sort out. There are some various pieces parts on several spots including my personal drives at home but it is yet to be determined exactly to what extent.

In the process of rebuilding the site we will take the opportunity to upgrade our vBulletin software as well.

If anyone has any information leading to the apprehension of the person or persons responsible LWG will offer a reward. If you do have information email me at cobra@lwg3d.org .

We apologize for the interruption and look forward to being back online soon.

[Beamtracer]

Originally posted by bmckain
If anyone has any information leading to the apprehension of the person or persons responsible LWG will offer a reward. That sounds like one of those old wild west "wanted" posters. You didn't state whether you want him dead or alive.

[uberslayer™]

I dunno.................What are you offering.............................He's paying me quite well to keep quite about it.;)

[Meaty]

that sucks man, best of luck catchin the a-hole and best of luck getting the site back up!

[Red_Oddity]

Whenever they get this little f-er i hope they go to his house and grind every piece of hardware he own to dust, and then hack his bank account and wipe that one clean...
'What do you mean mister hacker? I thought you thought this stuff was hillarious?...Then why did you do it?...Ooooh...you can't get laid...well...can't blame the girls for not wanting to...i mean, if you'd date the elephant man, he would be the looker....'

Sorry, but i've had hacker on my system aswell (30 trojans dumped and 2.5 GB of network traffic got created by using my system as backdoor for other purposes resulting in me breaking my FUP with my provider resulting in fines for me and not being allowed to reach a certain traffic max for the next two months...) and i despise these people.

[Zippy]

Thanks for the notice there Bob :). I hope things can get up and running for us once again (I sure miss it already). Meanwhile I'll post my work here until firedragon and the main server are back up and running.

Good Luck and Godspeed my friend,

Nick

[Fallenswordsman]

Many thanks for the information, Bob - its a pity that someone took it upon themselves to vandalise such a great community. Like Zippy, I miss LWG! There just isn't another forum like it - but all the best in getting things back up and running again and lets hope we don't get any recursions of this kind of thing.

All the best, and see you when things are back up again!

[novadesigns]

Thanks for hanging in there guys. There's not much the Council can do--except for Bjorn--but wait until webpipe has us pieced back together.

Thanks for your patience. :)

[bmckain]

We are getting close. We were able to restore the entire vBulletin database, thanks to webpipe’s hard work. There will still be some holes in the images from various forums but most of that will be fairly recent and therefore most of the members will be able to re-upload the missing images.

We expect to have the finishing touches on the PhP install in the morning and with a little luck should be back online sometime Thursday.

We will post an open notice at that time but my guess is most of you will already know before we get the message posted. Anyway, thanks for all the comments, the wait won’t be long now.

Bob aka Cobra

[Fallenswordsman]

Good to know that you're almost there - it might seem sad to say, but I miss LWG!
My thanks to all of you though for all the work you've done to get us back up and running again!:)

[Zonda]

I noticed the url now has the lwg logo on, are things looking good?

[richpr]

Flip the switch, open the doors, let us in ;)

[phil lawson]

Hope you catch who ever did it...meanwhile, the chat room is now my home from home :)

[Zonda]

what about that jase9134 guy, cant remember his exact name, he caused quite a stir when he posted on the newtek forums here and said I'm usin a copy then days later asked people to give him their license and then he started on the lwg forums stirrin up the **** and the whole piracy thing started an argument with the guy there

[richpr]

It's back! :D

[bmckain]

It's official, we just got LWG back online this afternoon. We're still scrambling but crippled or no, we're baaacckk!!!!!!

:D