Astalavista.com hacked, including details

Post by obanite » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 2:29 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #14

gmazzola wrote: post #2

Page as it appeared on June 5, 2009 12:15AM EDT: http://pastebin.com/f751e9f5b The post is a little low on details concerning the actual exploit used, but there's pretty massive carnage. Let's hope the admins have offsite backups. For those who don't know of Astalavista, it was a popular website for "hackers" with relatively low-quality content. It started in 1994, and was one of the first search engines for computer…

They did have off-site backups, which the hacker found and erased. One strategy that I employ to mitigate this is to have my backup service connect to the production server, rather than the other way around. That way if your production services are compromised, your backups remain untouched (on a machine that's running no services, behind a firewall, etc, and for all intents invisible).

Post by jlcheng » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 2:46 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #14

gmazzola wrote: post #2

Page as it appeared on June 5, 2009 12:15AM EDT: http://pastebin.com/f751e9f5b The post is a little low on details concerning the actual exploit used, but there's pretty massive carnage. Let's hope the admins have offsite backups. For those who don't know of Astalavista, it was a popular website for "hackers" with relatively low-quality content. It started in 1994, and was one of the first search engines for computer…

They did have off-site backups, which the hacker found and erased. One strategy that I employ to mitigate this is to have my backup service connect to the production server, rather than the other way around. That way if your production services are compromised, your backups remain untouched (on a machine that's running no services, behind a firewall, etc, and for all intents invisible).

Post by nertzy » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 4:35 PM UTC

DrJokepu wrote: post #44

Confusion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic, but please, don't use 'virii'. The correct plural is 'viruses'. 'Virii' is wrong for two reaons: 1) The Latin plural of word ending in -us is not -ii. -i at best. 2) 'Virus' doesn't have a Latin plural, because its meaning is like (in the sense of not having a plural) 'sand': it already denotes a multitude.

Being a Latin geek myself I can't help but point out that nouns in the fourth declension (u stem) also end in -us in singular and receive an -us affix in plural as well. "Virus" is however, in the second declension (virus -i n. "slime, poison, goo") with the oddity of being neutral while having a second declension -us ending which is normally a feature of masculine nouns. And indeed, its plural would be "viri".

Post by c00p3r » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 4:49 PM UTC

Post by Tritis » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 5:36 PM UTC

sev wrote: post #34

Confusion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic, but please, don't use 'virii'. The correct plural is 'viruses'. 'Virii' is wrong for two reaons: 1) The Latin plural of word ending in -us is not -ii. -i at best. 2) 'Virus' doesn't have a Latin plural, because its meaning is like (in the sense of not having a plural) 'sand': it already denotes a multitude.

Why is it that the plural of "radius" is "radii" but the plural of "virus" is not "viri"? I don't see "virus" as inherently denoting a multitude in the dictionary. Just curious.