Originally posted by RichardS
I've heard reports that some of my images were 'deleted' when uploaded from my HD and I just noticed that Tank Combat Badge of WWI in the 'Who am I' thread has been changed. Again, this is an image I had directly uploaded from my HD. Do the moderators, web masters know if we are still under attack?
Since different people are seeing different things, I would lay $20 down that the ACG site itself isn't being hacked -- rather, a mirror site is being hacked. Might be interesting if the people seeing "hacked" items were to report their physical location and IP to the forum moderators; that should pin down which of the mirror sites are getting whacked. Then the moderator could report to the owner of the mirror...
There are public internet mirrors and 'hidden' mirrors. Not 'hidden' as in secret, just 'hidden' as in there is no public display of the mirror; you just go ahead and enter "www.amazon.com" in your http toolbar and end up there...except you didn't really end up at the Amazon.Com main website hosted out of Redmond; you probably ended up at the 'hidden' mirror in LA, Chicago, Cincinnatti or New York.
Same with the ACG Forum website. Not that the ACG webmaster asked anyone to set up mirrors; it's just that the companies that actually run the Internet backbone, and some of the main consumer internet companies like AOL, set up mirrors in order to reduce traffic on the main backbone - which allows for faster downloads and faster pages for actual users like U and me (& hackers too, unfortunately).
In theory the mirrors and the primaries yakk with each constantly. In practice even a relatively small site like the ACG Forum can be so huge that only "official udpates" are packet-tossed between mirrors and primaries. So a hacker might dink around with a mirror, and if he chose an old page seldom visited & reset the "last edited" timestamp on that page, the mirror wouldn't "know" to toss an update to the main/actual website.
Thus, you'd have a hacked mirror and a correct primary.
Well, it's just a possibility.