Hax!
The site got hacked and is being worked on. Hopefully it’ll all be back to normal in a day or three?
For now you can view new pages at Patreon whether you’re a supporter there or not.
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The good ‘ol Paypal tip jar, good for hit and run donations.
Oh no!
Thought something bad had happened, when there had been only one comment for the last page after four days, and then it was a broken site from 5 years ago :(
Fvcking hack bastids. This crap is a crime and one would think that the FBI/DOJ would be on top of it.
FBI/DOJ can only do so much, especially if the hacker(s) are in China, India, or Russia, or anywhere else. And if they’re in Africa, you’re better of whistling in the dark…
(a lengthy statement of my opinion of the hacker’s origins, habits, personal hygiene, and probable afterlife destination)
(Sydney holds up card reading “6.5”)
Where you live this is a crime.
Where the criminal lives they’re heroes, successfull businessmen or smalltime victimless white collar criminals with large checkbooks.
Not unless it’s a .gov site, I can promise you that :’)
Huh. Second webcomic I follow that’s been hacked recently (Questionable Content is the other. And no, the content isn’t at all questionable).
The content of QC is tame to tipid at best.
Unless you have very polarising views about coffee
Someone told me coffee is a slow poison. It must be slow; I’ve been drinking it for forty-five years and I’m not dead yet…
Oxygen is an even slower poison.
Not as slow as water
Fear not for Dihydrogen Monoxide always works. Everybody who consumes it eventually dies!
Depends on if you’re drinking it or trying to breathe it.
Prequel Adventure also got hacked or something.
third for me.. Kaffe-kult got hit and it’s creator didn’t even know until i sent them a message about it. whoever took it over has been posting a mishamsh of AI generated nonsense twice a day since the 23rd.
How badly? Lost archive, or worse?
Ads taking over random pages, for one. It seemed like all the images are still intact, but the pages themselves probably need checking over.
While we get why Ad Hijacking is typically included under “Hacked” I have trouble accepting it as such, because there wasn’t any actual intrusion, and typically won’t have any long term effects. I’ll grant it’s more ‘hacked’ than having someone create a new social media account appearing to be you, but honestly, I spend so much of my professional life stumbling over Jargon and Definition that I’ve developed thin skin for that sort of thing.
The archives are apparently all intact, but that’s just a database of … data. The problem is that the databased is based on old technology vulnerable to attacks (duh). And now that the web site has been updated it can’t communicate with the old database. They’re working on porting everything over. (info from r/grrlpowercomic and Patreon)
Sorry to hear about this.
I hope things get fixed without too much hassle for you.
It took a couple of months for QC to come back when it got hit.
They’re still not fully back…the current page never loads for me, I have to go to a previous comic and then back up to see the newest each day.
It’s back, follow the link where it lists QC as one of his comics or Google questionable content and you’ll find it.
It goes straight to the latest page for me. Try clearing your cookies for QC and make sure you’re going to questionablecontent.net
Outdated PHP is indeed, the most likely source for the hack to have taken place.
Glad it’s not completely fried, and your host can fix it to pre-hack conditions.
Good luck, hope it’s relatively painless to recover.
Your Host doesn’t back up the site, do they?
PHP is a security nightmare, if that’s what they’re using.
Good luck. Might be time to look for another host.
The internet brings out the worst in so many people. The idea of being nasty or doing illegal things and never facing a consequence is very attractive to some folks.
Not much to be done about it, save keep adjusting expectations downwards.
It’s not just that internet brings out the worst, but more so the fact that internet effectively removes distances: if you leave your home unlocked there is only handful of people who could break in, but if you leave your website “unlocked” anyone with access to the internet can break in.
Which neatly links out to the issue with backups: even if the hosting site has perfect backups, the best they could do (quickly) is to restore the website to perfect copy of it pre-hack. Which would mean it would have Comic Easel that has not been updated for years, and some old version of PHP 7, which also has not received security updates for years – it would be hacked again since that’s equivalent of not only leaving your front door unlocked but wide open.
That’s not how backups work. You back up content. You don’t just back up the operating system. The backups should not depend on what program you’re using to show the comics/data. If it does, you need to hire someone who understands computers and programming.
If you did back up the software and restore it, it would have the same security holes and get hacked again. According to DaveB’s comments on the Patreon thread, the host updated some of the software and the updated version doesn’t properly access the database with the comic images and comments, so some more work needs to be done to fix that.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Kaffe Kult by Andrea Bowersox got hit too. My feed reader started loading up with spam for some online casino app.
Will this be an opportunity to fix minor issues?
Allow comments to be edited and deleted?
(Although… I AM forced to triple check my spelling!)
Personally I think it’s more fun when you can’t delete or edit comments.
This is the second comic I know of that’s been hacked recently.
“If I had a Nickel for every time….”
Hackers are truly pathetic. Looking forward to reading one of my favorite webcomics again soon. Take care Dave.
To be fair, the term has come to mean anybody with high-level computer skills whether they use them for good or evil.
Now I have a mental image of:
(Leon tapping at keyboard)
“Real hacker talents are rare, and if you have them, chances are you’re the only person you’ve ever met who has them. That isolation might make you feel like you’re the smartest person on earth. That you’re unstoppable. That your skillz give you primacy to hurt or rule over others.”
(cut to black-hat hacker’s system losing its magic smoke)
“Well, I promise you… I’m smarter.”
damn questionable content got hit a few says ago, too
First Questionable Content, now this? God damn it, those hackers are annoying.
I will never understand the point of hacking a webcomic.
Same reason for everything else getting hacked. Try to redirect traffic to their trap sites for a number of specific reasons. Worm injection, spread more malware, pishing attacks, etc.
Questionable Content was totally hacked several weeks ago. Grrl Power & Questionable Content are my two favorite go-to webcomics; seeing both suffering from immature cowards with no moral compass brings me down while making me angry and frustrated on your behalf. Best of luck restoring & securing your project!
Not a comic, but Whateley Academy got hit three weeks ago, too. Fortunately, they’d already been working on ditching their hosting and the Joomla/Kunena Forum system that was never very good to begin with, so they were at least in a position to have the replacement site up relatively quickly. I’m worried that replacing Joomla with WordPress is a bit like replacing a square wheel with a triangular one, but here’s wishing them luck.
whelp…. you must be worth targeting Dave. CONGRATS!
seriously though. cyber security is a HUGE issue. i recently felt the need to offer up a password analasys and suggestion to game mates of mine. Phrases with leet speak guys. i like to use movie quotes! In(0nC!3v@ble? maybe.
‘Sokay. Knew something was wrong Sunday. Good luck with repairs.
Sidney, the password being “batman123” is Not a good password!
Probably some crypto scam rug pull scheme hackers cooked up. Fortunately they didn’t seem to have complete control otherwise they would have slapped a redirect to a scam site.
How dare they!
Notify the ARC and ask them to put Leon on the case!
That will teach them!
This is the 4th webcomic I visit that has been hit with a denial of service attack. They seem to be targeting popular webcomics too.
This happened last month, took the webcomic Questionable Content.
So many hacks happening. I got hit with one, and others have been trying for the last month. Some sites got hit. Now this has been hit. The heck is going on? It’s like some kind of petty cyberwar is happening.
Since I can’t comment on patreon,. I think the ckicken will successfully consume kaboomoid. However all maxima needs to do is keep hold of one of the legs and hammer throw the resulting creature out of the ring. The other option would be figuring out how the the biomechanics who created the thing, passivate it between rounds.
Damn – I thought about sending a message when reading about the critical wordpress security vulnerability as this site is based on wordpress but then forgot about it. Hope it gets fixed soon and no data loss occured.
oof! Good luck with fixing things!
I use this site to post ideas I have because I’ve noticed there are a lot of pretty smart people on it, and I want to get the idea’s out there.
Idea for the future: Big dust bunny ships. Make a big spaceship that is just a big electro-magnet that sweeps up all the dust and micro-metorites along the routes like between Earth and Mars or other areas of interest where we would want to travel. That way holeing of ships or space suits would be lessened.
I called them dust bunny ships because they would be huge dust bunny’s by the time they get to their destination.
Great idea, which is complicated by orbital mechanics.
The “path” is ever changing.
The good news there’ll be enough to clean that follows said paths, especially in the gravity wells of the destinations.
The bad news lots of stuff doesn’t.
Also if you can build good telescopes laser clearing is cheaper for destination gravity wells.
Check Kessler Casade and orbital clearing sattelites for more information.
The biggest holdup is diplomatic and artificial.
Any space ship that can clear space debries can also “clear” sattelites and thos are of huge importance to militaries.
The solution are those lasers again.
The heavier something is the harder it becomes to clear with lasers and sattelites tend to weigh a lot more than micro meteorites.
By having a weak laser one could signal that it’s truly only for space debries cleaning.
Drawbacks to the laser approach is that it can’t handle large swarms, because retargeting is somewhat expensive.
Your electromagnetic dust bunny should handle those just fine.
Also althougalthough space dust, radiation and rocks are currently the biggest threaths to space ships, I expect those problems to be dwarved in an interterrestial civillization by pollution problems.
Light polution rendering shippers blind, propulsion exhaust clogging up shipping lanes, etc.
Your dustbunny ship could at least help with the ship exhaust.
It would probably need to be powered by a light sail to correct for all the inertia inherited from the exhaust, which flies in exactly the opposite direction it wants to go(interterrestial street cars still need to obey the same traffic laws as everybody else).
An extra advantage to light sail usage is that it’ll have a much bigger surface area to clean non-charged debris such as young exhaust.
It would be like dredging a harbor. Not the most adventurous setting for a sci fi adventure perhaps but a harbor town can be a place where you meet all kinds of people from all over the solar system. It can be a rich and nice place to live or a poor and wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Backups! Updates! Updated backups! Backed up updates!
Version control! Local and offsite!
huh? wth? hope it gets better soon!
Thank you for the update. I was curious.
2 of the websites I have (one for when I was self-publishing) and the other for my business usually get around 5-10 hacking attempts a day. It’s a pain in the butt.
*Summons Leon and ArcDark. The hunt is On!
Incidentally, this Seems about the time Dabbler would have finished that Hammer.
maybe the next villain should be a hacker who suffers a terrible “accident”