Well it's official.....

[STIBROKER]

http://www.insurance-forums.com/default.asp


the old board is gone.........man there was lots of good info there that was lost.....I am sure the NAA head office is ecstatic......pour a 40 for the board....

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Thank God. I will state that I don't know who the owner of the other board was, but he/she should be ashamed of themselves for allowing a professional board to denegrate into a sea of unprofessional spam. If you no longer want to mess with a site yet you still want to keep the domain name you simply stop hosting it.

 

[STIBROKER]

Thank God. I will state that I don't know who the owner of the other board was, but he/she should be ashamed of themselves for allowing a professional board to denegrate into a sea of unprofessional spam. If you no longer want to mess with a site yet you still want to keep the domain name you simply stop hosting it.

what these guys do is they hold all the threads for ransom....and if you pay them they will give you your board back.......

 

[Sam]

It is truly a shame that there are such people out there, who would deface information like that. A lot of hours went into some excellent posts and threads there. The owner of the site is http://www.insurancenetcenter.com/ which is partially owned by Todd Hylton. I mentioned once before, I asked if I could buy it, and he started to tell me something about having recently sold a domain name for $100,000.

Shep mentioned that he just downloaded the entire forum, maybe he can email a copy to anyone who needs it.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Actually, the hackers have no control at all. If the board is being archived (which I'm sure it's not) all the owner has to do is take the hijacked board down and put up the archived version. Unless you own the domain you cannot actually permantely kill a site. Yes, an amateur can hack into it but if the owner was active the site would be right back up.

 

[Sam]

I am positive that the board has not been archived in over a year. I actually have a word document with all the usernames, numbers of posts, and email addresses of all the members, but 905 of them are spammers.

I think that just about all of the quality posters have come over to this board.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Like I said, a spammer cannot harm any site permantely. You simply take it off-line but put up the archived version. Most boards "auto-archive" so maybe you'd lose one day of posting.

 

[Sam]

The problem is that it is on an old Snitz forum and their is simply no way to protect it. There are some security holes which were never fixed, since they stopped updating the software. They can't put it back up, even if it was archived, because they lose their access to it. Once you have access to the admin panel, which hacking gives you, you can delete the archives, and then they are lost forever. They ping the security hole, get the administrators password, and then change it. Now, there is nothing the site owner can do, since they do not have any access to the forum at all.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

But the owners still own the domain name and pay for the hosting. Worst case scenario is you cancel the hosting and take everyone offline. But you're right - unless you archived and saved everything you'd lose the board and have to put up a new one. The newer boards, like this one, have more security features.

It would also be more trouble than it's worth, but if it was an amateur you could get the IP address of the hacker, then file with their service provider. The service provider would investigate and possibly terminate their service.

In more extreme cases where you were harmed financially by a hacker (again, saying it was an amateur hacker operating from his home computer) you could get a court order for the ISP to disclose who the person is and sue them.

 

[Sam]

Yes, and since there is no financial benefit to these forums, it wouldn't be worth fighting about. I asked a few people about writing a script to import the old threads into an archive section on this space, and they could do it, although it wouldn't be cheap.
However, the owners of the old site wouldn't give me access to the database, which is the only way to do it.