[imc-ontario] McLuhan server update

[Cedric Puddy]

Hi Folks,

The McLuhan Indy Media server that colocates with
us, as you likely have noticed, is currently offline,
and has been for days.

Some unscrupulous soul or two found a crack, wreaked
havok (which makes it much harder than one might
like to even look at the state of the machine,
and worse to try and fix it), and finished up by
setting up a set of pages to attempt to steal
personal information from unsuspecting web
users.

Due to the risk of people being duped, and
thereby potentially damaged by the server,
it was determined that taking the machine
offline was the safest thing, from the perspective
of protecting the public and so forth.
It wouldn't make any of us happy, I'm
sure, to somehow discover that someone
suffered identity theft because of some
misuse of the McLuhan server.

Anyway, priority number one has been to
collect evidence (archive logs, records
of running processes, network ports in
use, and so on) in an effort to determine
where the crack lies.  If it was in a web
application that we were running, then it
would sure be nice to patch that web application
before we make the content available to
the world again.  (Or to put it another
way -- wouldn't it suck to put things
back online, and get nailed again the
next day?)

If you have skills/time/knowledge that may
be useful in this process, please contact
me and let me know.

If you are a stakeholder and can suggest
ways that we could limit the impact
of this outage on you, or are interested
in where things are at, then by all means,
get in touch and let me know.

	Best Regards,

	-Cedric

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