TGO David

Not unless you are specifically being targeted. We teach this method to our people at my place of employment. I personally don't use it but my system is somewhat similar, albeit based on a mathematical formula that uses a sequence of #s and variables pulled from the "root" of my passwords. Unfortunately it also means most of my passwords are about 12 characters long.

I'm always game for hearing how we can avoid pitfalls. Feel free to shoot me a PM or reply publicly if you have any key "take aways" from that other experience that can help us make sure we're doing the right thing.

Going to answer these two together. This was not a targeted attack. Rather, this was an exploit of dozens (maybe hundreds) of forums across the Internet running IPB and vBulletin, perhaps other software as well, all of which were leveraging third party user interface (UI) code hosted by Google and Yahoo. We were just one of the unfortunate communities using this code which allowed this group to lift portions of our member list for use in a mass emailing. So no, I don't think there was any further motive than just spamming a million or so email addresses with anti-political rhetoric.

Allow me to make one preemptive remark before someone makes the conclusion that this would have never happened on vBulletin software: The problem stemmed from the fact that we used Google-hosted code for certain UI elements. vBulletin sites have been hit by this same thing. https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/398334-Emails-from-quot-Anonymous-quot-All-appear-to-be-from-sites-running-vBulletin?highlight=anonymous https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/380561-vBulletin-3-x-and-4-x-Redirect-Security-Exploit?highlight=anonymous Not sure if you guys can read those links or not but basically they're talking about the same emails some of you guys got. Again, it's a total pain in the ass and has caused me to revert back to hosting all of our UI code and not relying on Google (or Yahoo) for their public libraries any longer. It will definitely cause a performance hit on the site but it's worth it.

You can read the announcement here: http://www.tngunowners.com/forums/topic/47498-tgo-forum-database-partially-compromised-email-addresses-swiped/ You can use this thread to ask any questions that you might have and I will do my best to answer them. First and foremost let me say that I -- like many of you, I suspect -- am extremely aggravated that this happened. It's a complete pain in the ass for a forum administrator to deal with and due to the nature of the way it happened, it is also one of those really annoying things that we are completely at the mercy of others to prevent. We didn't write the software. Neither did Invision Power in this particular instance. The loophole that was used came from a third party add-on contributed by a member of the IPB community. Second, it appears that the only damage so far is that several of our members have been spammed with anti-political junk email. Third, and most importantly perhaps, it is crucial that if you use the same password here as you use somewhere else, that you change your password in both places to something unique. And by unique I mean not shared between any other sites. This is perhaps the biggest pain in the ass of all because most of us tend to use the same or similar passwords on the different sites we visit. It's an inherently unsafe practice but it is also inherently human. Anyway, ask away. Like I said, I'll do my best to answer.

Nice!

Show off.

Old school 34. Nice.

That could take years to occur after a collapse of society, especially if the collapse is brought on by an EMP attack. Food and the ability to provide food (hunting, trapping, the equipment for both) will be the most valuable commodities. That and perhaps medicines but even those supplies will quickly run out.

All of the existing orders have been packaged up and are going to the post office today. We still have PINK hats left for the ladies on the forum and in your lives. Don't be stingy... just because you can't have a kickin' TGO hat doesn't mean you should keep your better half from sporting one.

If you're serious, you need to work on that.

When/if society collapses, paper and metal currency won't likely be worth anything. Food will be king second only to the ability to provide food.

Nope.

Why the hell would anyone go and open the door like that. *sigh* But at least it turned out reasonably well for the good guy. Probably would have been a lot less stressful if he'd just holed up and waited for the perp to try and force entry and THEN popped him.

Ok, I think it's fixed now. Someone be brave and turn signatures back on and see if it still does it for you.

On what page(s) ? I'm not seeing any signs of it now.

No, I removed yours just in case.

It does.

TGO has not been hacked. See the announcements forum. This is a DNS hijacking attempt, nothing more. Keep calm and carry on.

Well they are a publicly traded company. If enough of their shareholders marched into an annual stockholder's meeting and demanded it, they would pretty much have to listen to the majority of ownership.

I thought I'd dredge this one up from the files and beat the dead horse a little more.... Today I went to ship an item that one of the TGO members had purchased from me. The item was too big to fit into one Medium Flat Rate box by just a hair, so I shoved two boxes together to extend it by about 3-inches, taped them together and then calculated my postage based off of weight, dimensions and destination ZIP code which came out to be more than the flat rate box would have required would one of them had worked. Again, I was paying more than the flat rate box required. The doorbell rang this morning and I found my postal carrier standing there with the box in her hands and a pissed look on her face. Her: "This won't work. These are two medium flat rate boxes taped together!" Me: "Yes and that's more than one box's worth of postage calculated off of weight and dimensions. What's the problem?" She stared at the postage label for a few seconds as if trying to wrap her brain around it and then blurted out "Well it just won't work." Me: "Why the hell not? It's the correct postage I just used your boxes and improvised." Her: "That's why it won't work. They are flat rate boxes." Me: "You do realize that I can just take that, wrap it in brown paper, slap the same postage on it and it will ship just fine... right?" Her: "Well... this won't work." {sigh} Me: "Whatever. You can pick it up tomorrow with brown paper wrapped around it then. This is why you guys are going out of business you know." She just stomped off at that point and dismissed me with a wave. I f'king hate our government's agencies sometimes.

He's referencing the Bernie Goetz case. This was a big news story when I was growing up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz Hit the link and read more.

Welcome to TGO!

I always had a lot of fun when I was doing this. A media blasting cabinet is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned. If you do enough of them, you're going to want to build a purpose-built oven for it as well. I never got quite that far but was almost to the point of building one. Had I needed to do any shotgun or rifle barrels, I most certainly would have. You should give Norrell's Moly Resin a try sometime too.

This isn't an order thread or an "I'll take one in black if you make them" thread... it's simply clearing out what we already had on hand. Sorry.