EXPLAINING TEMPORARY CLOSING DOWN OF SITE

Dear PBR members,

Last week the site went down for over 24 hours. This happened (we think) because when we re-designed the site in late 2008 and re-launched the pages in early 2009 someone managed to insert a fraudulent phishing virus into one of the folders and it was timed to start its phishing activities a few weeks ago. This led to the hosting company giving us multiple warnings to cleanse the site of the fraudulent files responsible for the illegal activity. Even though our technical team worked tirelessly to locate and remove all the fraudulent files they failed to meet the deadline given by the hosting company and they closed PBR down along with Minibikevids.com. The virus had infiltrated both these sites.

We are now continuing the work to ensure the site is 100% free of the virus and we plan to upgrade the security features.

Spammers have also been attacking the site and trying to infiltrate it via the optin for the ezine. So we will have to address that problem as well to keep spammers out as much as we can.

Should the site ever close down temporarily again it will be for one of these reasons.

PBR Admin

2 Responses to “EXPLAINING TEMPORARY CLOSING DOWN OF SITE”

  1. Gary Hope  on December 14th, 2009

    Hi Chris.

    I hope you remember who I am.
    I doubt the problem was caused by what you’ve mentioned in the above blog post. PBR was one of many sites that were taken down recently due to the same issues. Overclockers Australia, Whirlpool, JB Hifi just to name a few all suffered the same fate due to what if I recall correctly was a SQL security hole.

    Overclocksers Australi was briefly redirecting a totally different site that was used to screw up users systems and the database was compromised.
    I’d advise that you put out a security alert to all users to change their user account passwords incase they were compromised as well. Many users use the same passwords for many sites so those accounts will be vulrunable as well.

    Kind Regards
    Gary Hope

  2. chris  on December 15th, 2009

    Hi Gary

    Of course I remember you – our former chief mod!

    PBR tech help appreciates your comments but they say that this was not the cause of the problem.

    We think we have identified the cause and they are working at taking measures now to stop it happening again.

    We are really sorry that the second time the site went down was for such a long time. It was totally outside of our control.

    We have now moved the site to a new server where a forced closure can not happen again.

    This is life on the Internet and no one is spared from the risk of fraud, hacking and phishing.

    Cheers………PBR Admin


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