hacking/harassing

[Miss Daisy]

Hey everybody,

I've got a couple of people on my board harassing me and my members, and threatening to hack into my admin account to delete my boards o.0

I don't know how serious these guys are, but they're more annoying than anything. I've banned them upwards of five times already in the last hour but they seem pretty persistant about hacking into proboards to get to me.

Anything I can do about these guys?

[CheatAreZee]

Hi Daisy,

I'd suggest enabling limited registrations (if you haven't already) within the general settings link of the admin panel. This way they won't be able to login to any accounts they create unless you approve them first. Eventually they'll get bored.

As far as the 'hacking' threat, your account is as strong as your password, guessing the password would be the only way they would be able to access the account. I'd suggest creating a password that's at least 8 characters in length, using a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. Having a combination like this would prove to be much harder for them to guess

[Miss Daisy]

thanks Ricky

They haven't created any accounts, actually.. they're spamming my c-box (where I've been getting their IPs and banning them, they're coming back about every ten minutes).

I don't think I'll have any problems with my password.. my admin account is pretty strong so I'm not too worried.. plus, I know most people when they talk about 'hacking' don't really know what they're doing and are only trying to scare me, but you can never be too sure, you know??

4 Nov 10, 12:25
666: proboards have 5 ports open and im getting into the mysql port

[Kami]

just throwing it out there, but if they successfully hacked 'proboards' as a whole, as the quote seems to suggest (the as a whole part, not the successful part xD), we're probably going to have more issues than one cracked admin account on a forum, which, in all likelihood, isn't their intent. =X

also, i seem to recall it being stated that pb hasn't been successfully hacked (as in properly hacked, not cracked) to date. =]

you may want to suggest having them hack into the admin accts here on support, i hear they give a reward if someone can successfully exploit the system without just cracking. xD

[Miss Daisy]

lol, thanks Kami. That makes me feel a bit better about the whole situation ;D

[Kami]

*pats* don't worry about it miss daisy. :3 last time someone threatened to hack my admin account, i told them OK. still waiting for it to be hacked, and this was two years ago. =D

[Lobo]

Proboards records the email you created your boards with. Therefore, I recommend you create your boards on one email and then immediately switch registration to a second email (thus hiding original "proof of ownership" email).

Make sure you don't use free microsoft emails for boards because hackers can crack them easy.

But if you made both emails with long complex passwords and security question answers (and not linked to any other email) and don't use them for anything else (hidden), you should be good.

The two ways to hack an admin account is by cracking admin login password or current email. Cracking login password isn't easy if it's long and complex. Cracking current email is impossible if you got it HIDDEN and created it using bogus info and long, complex random info (making sure you record all this in a record book offline). Using bogus info in creating email means even if someone finds you online they don't got the "correct" info to crack the email.

I run gaming forums where lots of hackers troll and even after four years I haven't been hacked though I know there been people trying.

If you done what I recommend, all you got to worry about on day-to-day basis is not clicking bad links or accepting any files that can keylog you. And to protect against that, I recommend KeyScrambler.