Hello to all the Guests!

[Lady of Rohan]

Yah, I never knew that Guest's where able to PM members. *shrugs* And one of them was reading this thread.

[Ruinel]

Originally posted by gollum9630
Some of them are doing wierd things.

OH... please... do not tell me! I don't want to know what 'weird things' they are doing.

[gollum9630]

i didnt know they could edit posts, or quote posts

[azalea]

Yes, and one said it was editing a post! Also, what does "moderating duties" mean? This is odd. As far as inktomisearch not existing, it might just be inaccessable, because I've never heard of the thingy it lists for me.

Edit: oops, you posted about them editing posts while I was writing my post, sorry for the duplication!

[gimli7410]

i tried not signing in and postoing something and it said i had to sign in to post so im not sure whats going on

[Rían]

very weird ... I saw all those guests, too.

[gollum9630]

Originally posted by azalea
Yes, and one said it was editing a post! Also, what does "moderating duties" mean? This is odd. As far as inktomisearch not existing, it might just be inaccessable, because I've never heard of the thingy it lists for me.

Edit: oops, you posted about them editing posts while I was writing my post, sorry for the duplication!

wait, you dont even know what moderating duties are. i thought it had to do with moderators and admins.

[Salquënòrëwen]

I was looking on "Who's Online", and one of the guest is registering! We may finally find out what's happening...

[azalea]

Well, in the boxes that tell what everyone is doing, for a couple of the "guests" it said moderating duties. I just meant that obviously something strange is going on because how could a guest be performing moderating duties, but then what exactly would a moderator be doing that it would list that as what they were doing. I mean, how does it know when I'm doing a moderator duty versus when I'm not? It listed me as looking at "who's online" or whatever. I don't know what exactly it means when it says "moderating duties."

[jerseydevil]

I think it might be hacker robots. I've never hacked and I'm just not sure. I know there is supposed to be a hacking contest on sunday. I hope this isn't part of it.

In order for the users to appear online and show up in the "who's online" page - they have to be updating the database. They have to be actually executing the pages.

[azalea]

I'm tech-illiterate, so I didn't understand what you said in your second paragraph, but your first paragraph concerns me a little. I keep noticing that it is looking at a lot of user profiles -- I hope they can't hack in and get our personal info (not that there's anything to obtain besides name and email address).
EDIT: Oh, after rereading your first paragraph, I see what you're saying -- that there has to actually be something "there" where they say it is, so to speak?
SECOND EDIT: Actually it's just email and our password it could get. I forgot we don't give our name when registering. So if everyone starts making weird posts on Sunday, I guess we'll know it's the hackers!

[Salquënòrëwen]

Hackers?! Gosh, I hope they're not!

[Coney]

inktomisearch.com (which according to Ben is where the majority of todays guests are coming from) apears to be nothing more than a statistics gathering set of programs, prolly sent here (you have to pay for the service) by whoever Ben + co have rented the server space from

So yer [posting/visiting] statistics are known........but yer IP's are safe

EDIT: A hacker wouldn't even comtemplate registering as a guest.........even if he's using a proxy [fake] server he could be traced.........a hacker would head straight for the hosting server, he shouldn't enter through vBulletin.

[azalea]

Maybe it's a vBulliten or maybe an advertiser thing just seeing how active the board is or something, then.

[jerseydevil]

Will hackers attack 6,000 Web sites in 6 hours on July 6?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government and private technology experts warned Wednesday that hackers plan to attack thousands of Web sites Sunday in a loosely coordinated "contest" that could disrupt Internet traffic.

Organizers established a Web site, defacers-challenge.com, listing in broken English the rules for hackers who might participate. The Web site appeared to operate out of California and cautioned to "deface its crime" -- an apparent acknowledgment that vandalizing Internet pages is illegal.

The Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday it was aware of the hackers' plans but did not expect to issue any formal public warnings. The Chief Information Officers Council, part of the Office of Management and Budget, cautioned U.S. agencies and instructed experts to tighten security at federal Web sites.

"Frankly, hacker challenges occur frequently, and we don't think they all rise to the level of a warning," Homeland Security spokesman David Wray said.

Home Internet users, who typically do not operate Web sites, probably would not be affected directly, said Oliver Friedrichs, the senior manager for security response at Symantec Corp.

An early-warning network for the technology industry, operating with Homeland Security, notified companies that it received "credible information" about the planned attacks and already has detected surveillance probes by hackers looking for weaknesses in corporate and government networks.

"We emphasize that all Web site administrators should ensure that their sites are not vulnerable," wrote Peter Allor of Internet Security Systems Inc., the Atlanta-based company that runs the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

Friedrichs, though, said Symantec's global monitoring network wasn't detecting unusual probes.

"We really haven't seen any of that activity," he said. "We're certainly going to keep watching and looking."

Separately, the New York Office of Cyber-Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination warned Internet providers and other organizations that the goal of the hackers was to vandalize 6,000 Web sites in six hours.
'A sand-bagging period'

New York officials urged companies to change default computer passwords, begin monitoring Web site activities more aggressively, remove unnecessary functions from server computers and apply the latest software repairs from vendors such as Microsoft Corp.

Chris Rouland, director of the X-force security team at ISS, said researchers monitoring underground chat rooms and other Internet activity detected a drop in the numbers of vandalized Web sites recently and an increase in the types of surveillance scans that typically precede computer break-ins.

"It's kind of a sand-bagging period," said Rouland, who predicted that hackers were quietly breaking into computers and waiting to vandalize them on Sunday.

The purported "prize" for participating hackers was 500-megabytes of online storage space, which made little sense to computer experts. They said hackers capable of breaking into thousands of computers could easily steal that amount of storage on corporate networks.

As for my second paragraph. Each page of entmoot is basically a small program that creates the page you see. In addition to creating the page - it also saves your posts to the database, etc. It also updates a table in the database that is used to show that you are online and where you are. After 20 minutes of inactivity - this information is deleted and the person no longer appears on entmoot. In order to update the database like that - you have to actually be executing these pages - not just looking at them on the server. I'm not sure if I've made this any clearer or not though.

Just think of a table - as like a area to save a group of similar data - like addresses. A database - is made up of multiple tables such as users, threads , posts, etc. Together this holds all the data that makes entmoot work. There are other parts to it - but this is the very basics.

[Coney]

Originally posted by azalea
Maybe it's a vBulliten or maybe an advertiser thing just seeing how active the board is or something, then.

Yup, that's what it seems to be........inktomisearch.com seems to be a service that large websites/hosting servers use a lot

[Bunnie_Queen_1146]

MOLY!!! theres 48!!!!
why is there so many!!?!

[Salquënòrëwen]

I'm confused now.... Oh well, I always am about something.

[azalea]

Thanks, JD, that clarifies it (to the extent that stuff like that can be clear to me! ).
Based on that article you posted, it could possibly also be the server doing some security measures due to the warning given about the 6th.

[jerseydevil]

Originally posted by Coney
inktomisearch.com (which according to Ben is where the majority of todays guests are coming from) apears to be nothing more than a statistics gathering set of programs, prolly sent here (you have to pay for the service) by whoever Ben + co have rented the server space from

So yer [posting/visiting] statistics are known........but yer IP's are safe

I would say it's more of a search engine bot. I was talking to Khamul about it yesterday - and we knew that all of them were coming from the same ISP. What is going on right now wouldn't be to obtain user information, such as what country people are from, how they got to entmoot, what browser people are using or number of visitors - that is just obtained from the servers log files. A bot doesn't have anything to do with obtaining that info.

EDIT: A hacker wouldn't even comtemplate registering as a guest.........even if he's using a proxy [fake] server he could be traced.........a hacker would head straight for the hosting server, he shouldn't enter through vBulletin.

True - but it depends on what the hacker is attempting to do. They can be analysing how entmoot works - in order to flood the system with a lot of fake posts, users, etc. All it takes is an understanding of the system and a program to run the pages and add the posts, threads, users, etc.

Hacking doesn't necessarily mean just going into the server and screwing with that - it can be screwing with a website in any number of ways.