Not everyone out there loves Open Source. Yes, I know this must be a real shocker for you folks. But the reality is that some people out there hate the movement so much that they are willing to go out of their way to deface Open Source related Websites. Terrible, but an unfortunate reality.

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.