Amiga.org
Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => General Internet News => Topic started by: System on July 05, 2004, 04:28:37 PM
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According to a post on their Web site, Amigart.com was destroyed by hackers (more than likely script-kiddies) and will most likely not return.
[color=336699]Editor's note : having suffered through this twice with Amiga.org, they have my personal sympathies and understanding. Here's to hope they find some way to channel their creativeness for the Amiga, even if they don't return to service. Amigart.com will be sorely missed.[/color]
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Bad stuff, I'd visited the site a few times and was never left anything other then impressed by the stuff they had there.
What the hell is the world comming to?
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I hand't been to amigart in years, because it was a mostly dead site with few updates.
I read the website today, and I agree totally with what they said, for news reports, they shouldn't have been expected to be able to configure security issues of the various tools....
but it is a sign of the times, that our community has more script kiddies who can repeat publicly well known exploits (not a bit of creativity went into bringing down a site like that...its all monkey see, monkey do)
and not enough computer talent to even defend against it...not enought talent to even make a backup.
I don't blame the news reports... but our community has almost no technical talent left.
SIGH
I said our community, I mean your community...SIGH
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Who says it was someone in the community? There are hacker groups that will pick on ANY site.
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this does truly suck.
:evil:
i find it hard to belive that there isn't SOME people who know how to protect a site from this sort of attack!
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@Cecilia,
The problem with this is the fact that we're mostly using freely available software. That means any little kiddie can crawl through it and look for ways to destroy it.
The only advantage with Xoops is that 2.x is so convoluted and obtusely written that it's difficult to get into. At the same time, it's so back-assed that no casual programmer can write for it.
It's just a matter of time before every Web site, large and small is broken into and destroyed. It's what we like to call "unsupervised latchkey kids syndrome". Mom's not home, so I'm bored, let's go destroy something. Trouble is, everything has gotten so complicated, destroying a Web site is not particularly difficult, even for a 14 year old.
Wayne
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Trouble is, everything has gotten so complicated, destroying a Web site is not particularly difficult, even for a 14 year old.
Especially when the exploits are already pre-made, floating around out in the wild. It's really no different (or more difficult) than buying a can of spraypaint and defacing some unguarded object around town. :-(
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Bad thing to hear about a for me yet unknown site this way :-(
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Admittedly, I must have visited this site about once? twice? okay, maybe three times during the whole period of X number of years that this site was on the net. It didnt appear to useful for me, and I can barely remember what it was for and what it looked like.
I can't say I'll miss it without lying, but I can say that it is sad to see another Amiga site go down the pan.
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Do you have to be 14 to find these exploit exploiter script deals? Any time I ever went looking for them, all I got was porn ads. I suspect that it's easy to find them, but my investigation into the matter never yeilded any results. I can only conclude that you have to be 14 years old to find them easily or else it'll be very difficult or impossible.
But, that thing Wayne said about latch key kids is right. They call that "idle hands"... you know, the "devil's playground". Middle class kids with computers and no supervision...and no midnight basketball. :-)
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they should check the web archive (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://AmigArt.com) if they want to try to rebuild the site.
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According to a post on their Web site, Amigart.com was destroyed by hackers (more than likely script-kiddies) and will most likely not return.
I don't want to sound rude, but didn't they have a backup... even an old one? I use a cheap, slow HD on its own power switch to make regular backups every week. Backing up databases is a huge pain, though.
The problem with this is the fact that we're mostly using freely available software. That means any little kiddie can crawl through it and look for ways to destroy it.
I get annoyed when people advocate free software so much because it's "better" than commercial software. What a lot of people forget about Open Source development is not better by default. It's better only if the developers are better. I've spent a lot of time working with other peoples' scripts, tracking down bugs and security holes, and it amazes me how sloppy people are when programming. Learning PHP and Perl really opened my eyes to how easy it is to crack a website. Back in my Amiga days, I thought hacking only happened when people chose stupid passwords. ;-)
Then again, there's so many backdoors in Perl and PHP, you have to jump through lots of hoops to filter data properly. I was really pissed off to hear that PHP supported a "feature" called autoglobals. Recent builds of PHP have that feature turned off by default, and the developers only lightly talk about it in the security section of the manual, as if they are trying to hide the fact it existed in the first place. Took me almost 2 weeks to figure out why my scripts were failing with no logs or error messages, and nobody on the PHP forums knew why my scripts were failing because they wanted me to give them error messages I didn't have. :-x PHP also has stupid automatic things like "magic_quotes_runtime". Whoever thought up that setting should be shot.
My favorite fix was a script that tested CGI variables for truth by using isset(). When I fixed autoglobals by using the $_POST[] hash, all the isset() queeries always became true. It took me forever to convert all the "isset($blah)" to "if($_POST['blah'])"...
Trouble is, everything has gotten so complicated, destroying a Web site is not particularly difficult, even for a 14 year old.
This is why Unix is so widely criticized for its poor security (at least among the GOOD programmers). Filesystem security really needs an overhaul. That's one of the things I'm looking for in any new OS. I see no point in making a new OS (Amiga, for example), only to use the old-fashioned single-user security model, or just recycle the ancient UNIX model. Java is a good example of how security should be done -- being able to quarantine an app to a particular folder or locking off access to the filesystem entirely.
Do you have to be 14 to find these exploit exploiter script deals? Any time I ever went looking for them, all I got was porn ads. I suspect that it's easy to find them, but my investigation into the matter never yeilded any results. I can only conclude that you have to be 14 years old to find them easily or else it'll be very difficult or impossible.
It's not that hard. As for finding pre-built scripts, you probably won't find much through google. All the really crude stuff is transferred via one of the many P2P programs out there.
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:pissed:
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I didn't visit Amigart.com much, but it makes me very :-x to see that another site was destroyed by hackers. :pissed:
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redfox
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very sad news :cry:
amigart.com thanks for all the good times