altnetpedia Back in Business

Posted by James Kovacs on 2008/04/22

Earlier today, an unknown hacker exploited a security vulnerability in ScrewTurn Wiki and replaced the altnetpedia site with pron links. I have restored the site and upgraded to the latest version of ScrewTurn, which is v2.0.30. (We were running v2.0.21 and the vulnerability was fixed in v2.0.24.) My bad for not keeping the site updated with latest. I apologize to the ALT.NET community for not being more vigilant with patches to the wiki software. I’ve added the ScrewTurn RSS feed to my reader to keep me apprised of future fixes.

To the unknown hacker, I hope that you’re satisfied. I had booked the afternoon off to take my two boys (ages 3 and 5) to the Science Centre, but instead spent it undoing your evil.

About James Kovacs

James Kovacs is a Technical Evangelist for JetBrains. He is passionate in sharing his knowledge about OO, SOLID, TDD/BDD, testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and related techniques. He blogs on CodeBetter.com as well as his own blog, is a technical contributor for Pluralsight, writes articles for MSDN Magazine and CoDe Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups. He is the creator of psake, a PowerShell-based build automation tool, intended to save developers from XML Hell. James is the Ruby Track Chair for DevTeach, one of Canada’s largest independent developer conferences. He received his Bachelors degree from the University of Toronto and his Masters degree from Harvard University.
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  • Erik

    Ah man. My condolences on the loss of your free time – I’ve been there myself. =(

  • http://devlicio.us/blogs/sergio_pereira/ sergiopereira

    Phew. For a second I thought all those new wiki entries were some of the more interesting open spaces sessions that I missed.

  • Chris

    just wanted to let you know that there’s still some lingering effects of the hack on the sandbox page of the wiki.

  • http://jimmybogard.lostechies.com Jimmy Bogard

    Thanks James!

    Although it did round out my knowledge of a few Asian foot fetish sites I missed in my intertubes adventures.

  • http://www.jameskovacs.com james.kovacs

    @All – Thanks for understanding, everyone.

    @Chris – Thanks for the heads up. I have unloaded the Sandbox plug-in completely so it won’t reload on a site restart. A quick investigation revealed that the Sandbox plug-in allows anonymous users to modify content. Although the content isn’t stored on disk, someone has a spambot pointed to the page to add pron links whenever the site restarts.

  • http://Bryan.ReynoldsLive.com Bryan Reynolds

    Sorry for your loss. With technology as pervasive and complex as it is in all of our worlds no one can catch and be on top of all things.

    The hacker does not care. No guilt, they feel they are doing you a favor.

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