Has your forum ever been hacked?

[Shortie]

Unfortunately, hacking is a very real issue and it's something we all worry about when it comes to running a forum. You will always get someone who is jealous of what you have or doesn't want to see you succeed and will try and ruin it for you by hacking your forum and taking things down or just generally messing up the place. I remember when I first started out and I was new to forums, there were some things I didn't do to better protect my forum and we had another forum who was in direct competition with us, copying everything we did pretty much word for word. They hated the fact that I fought back and wasn't having it that they were directly copying my forum and making it their own. They in the end hacked my forum and took it down to get at me and because I was so new, they were able to succeed in that. I didn't let that stop me though and soon came back but this time with help to prevent any hacking happening again.

Have you ever had a forum hacked? Do you know who it was and what their motive was?

 

[Cory]

Not the forum itself, but a feature of our forum, a chat feature specifically.

 

[Shortie]

Not the forum itself, but a feature of our forum, a chat feature specifically.

Oh, that is awful! Yeah, I have heard that sometimes certain things you add to forums if they have some kind of back door, it can make it easy for them to get in and hack through that. What kind of chat feature was it that they managed to hack through? I know people have things like shout boxes that they use as chat features. Did you manage to salvage things and fix the issue?

 

[Cory]

Oh, that is awful! Yeah, I have heard that sometimes certain things you add to forums if they have some kind of back door, it can make it easy for them to get in and hack through that. What kind of chat feature was it that they managed to hack through? I know people have things like shout boxes that they use as chat features. Did you manage to salvage things and fix the issue?

I think it was all JavaScript-made at first, which is quite simple to hack. It was, later on, remade with PHP.

 

[Cedric]

I've had a few forums 'cracked' back in the days of InvisionFree and ZetaBoards. Or betrayed by staff members by giving out their login details. Which is why I'm more on my guard now when I give access to staff controls. However I must admit that in the last couple of years I have seldom seen a cracking happening.

 

[Heatman]

My forum was never hacked and I have any hack threat to deal with. But where I have been hacked before is on social media specifically on my Facebook. This was because I never had Two Factor Authentication enabled on my account then.

 

[Reverie]

Like Cedric stated it was very typical back in the days, but now suddenly it doesn't happen as much. I remember I was changing my passwords frequently back in the day to make sure though lol.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I don't really see this happening much these days. Thankfully it's never happened to me, the only case where it came close to happening was when I promoted the wrong person to be an admin and they ended up deleting the themes I had installed and installing ones that didn't fit the niche. I'm just lucky they didn't delete posts and topics.