Hacked

[Kevin Pelton]

Some sad news to report. SonicsCentral.com was hacked yesterday, and it appears all the information in our databases was lost. That means all users and posts from the six-plus years of the APBRmetrics forum are gone.

If there is a silver lining, it's that we're now upgraded to the newest version of phpBB, which should offer some improved functionality. I'm still learning everything myself and will be playing with the settings to try to get things as close to normal as possible.

My apologies for all the lost posts and the inconvenience of having to reregister. I assure you that no one will miss the history more than me.

[greyberger]

That's unfortunate. It feels like somebody burned the Nerd Library of Alexandria.

[DSMok1]

Were there no backups anywhere? How about grabbing cached stuff from Google?

[Devin Black]

This just seems really odd to me.

Why would someone target this place? What would one have to gain from hacking this place? Being that it's a pretty neutral place/subject matter (not political, controversial, etc.), I don't see why someone would have any interest in taking it down.

[schtevie]

This is terrible. I hope that the archives are somewhere to be found. What a waste.

But in case not, let the record show that I was right about everything....always.

[mattstahlhut]

It seems that you can get some stuff from waybackmachine.org. For instance:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/200810 ... 65062559c6

And selected posts from this:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/200810 ... um.php?f=1

But the selection of posts available is limited.

I had more difficulty with Google cache; the updates are more recent, but it appears that the general board page was cached, but none of the posts. But maybe someone with better internetting skills could find more.

[Crow]

If the site was hacked and if there is no back-up at server level and no way to recover it, I see that google has perhaps 5,000+ pages in its cache.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ah ... pbrmetrics

Have to click the cache button, not the item title.

I checked a few pages and see they are there in full.

Not sure how long it stays there. Perhaps a portion of the past could be recovered piece by piece.

http://waybackmachine.org might be of some help too.


This event had nothing directly to do with the recently announced planned end / transfer of the Sonics side of sonicscentral.com to the sonicsgate site?

[DSMok1]

Does anybody know how to spider Google cache? That's probably the way to go, though it seems that it mostly only has the first pages of threads--I think.

[mtamada]

Unbelievable. At least no one took my username in the meantime.

I guess that, given that we pay zero fees to register here, having backup service is not part of the package.

If this were the NFL, we could hatch dark theories about Bill Belichick sabotaging the research community because they were honing in on his secret, just as Robert Redford's literary research group had inadvertently stumbled on a CIA plot in "Three Days of the Condor" -- and got assassinated en masse. But thankfully no one in the NBA seems Machiavellian enough to do that.

[EvanZ]

Bummer. The only thing to do is build it back up better than ever!

[Mike G]

This is just a bit too depressing.

[EvanZ]

There's some stuff at Internet Archive:

http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://www. ... pbrmetrics

[schtevie]

Oh, and I'm Mike Tamada now too.....mtamada is but an impostor.

[Jeff Fogle]

Very sad news...

[NickS]

Wow . . . . I'm so sorry.

I'm sad about the lost posts -- there are some things that I've written here that I would have liked to be able to reference, but I can't imagine what it's like for you, KP.