Moderator Account Accessed By 3rd Party

[Artichoke Lover]

I was just instantly terrified because I know that A) mods don't use profanity and B) it's not april fools day lol

I was honestly surprised that nothing happened on April fools lol.

 

[EmmaRainboe]

I was honestly surprised that nothing happened on April fools lol.

I think you missed it.

 

[EmmaRainboe]

I was just instantly terrified because I know that A) mods don't use profanity and B) it's not april fools day lol

Same. I kept saying I hope this is a late April fools joke.

 

[black_cat]

I'd like to say thank you for such an AMAZING job from the moderators!! That was scary and I'm so glad that you guys were able to get it under control so quickly. Any idea if we're ever going to get our mod back? (I heard it was Kathy's account??) We love all our mods and it would be a shame if someone couldn't use BYC anymore through no fault of their own.

 

[H-B-O]

NOTE: From what we can see in the logs, NO USER INFORMATION WAS ACCESSED OR CHANGED!

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Here's a high-level of what happened over the last hour:

• At 11:07 pm PST, we saw some really odd stuff... a bunch of threads were "soft deleted" (basically, they won't show up for members, but they are still in the system).
• After some quick investigation, we discovered one of the moderator accounts was accessed by an unknown person who started to mass-delete threads.
• Our team QUICKLY moved into action and:
• Blocked the moderator's account
• Forced all other moderators' accounts to new passwords
• Started the process of "undeleting" the threads

Again, from what we can see in the logs, NO USER INFORMATION WAS ACCESSED OR CHANGED!

UPDATE: To clarify, moderators can NOT access Private Message conversations, passwords, etc.

We have limits on what our moderators can see / do, and fortunately those limits proved themselves very effective in this situation

Also, pretty much everything and anything a moderator does, can be completely undone by me

In the 15 years I've been running forums, this is the first time this has happened. That said, we're going to keep digging deeper into this to figure out what went wrong, and what needs to be done to prevent it in the future! For example, we will require all our moderators to use "2 factor authentication" moving forward. Usually this is only really important for Admins, but we want to add this additional layer for even more protection!

Thank you for everyone's patience as we worked through this, but a HUGE THANK YOU to our amazing team (especially @DuckLady) for such speedy response and help!

You guys are the best!!

 

[Artichoke Lover]

I think you missed it.

I did lol. I just remembered to go back and check the learning center thread after I posted. I was extremely suspicious if it . I was working a double shift that day lol so I forgot to check after work.

 

[KingD]

 

[Wee Farmer Sarah]

A heartfelt and relieved thank you to Nifty Chicken and the amazing staff of professional computer whizzes that keep this website a safe place to communicate with fellow poultry enthusiasts. Good job!

 

[Chickeria]

Thank you to the great team!

 

[Lemon-Drop]

Thank you so much, BYC staff, for resolving things quickly. It was quite upsetting to see this. Thankfully, I didn’t receive any notifications with the message. (Guess my threads aren’t to interesting! )

I’m so thankful that the staff in this wonderful community was able to step in quickly and get things back to normal.... I will say that for a moment, I was worried that the threads wouldn’t be able to come back... thankfully I was wrong!

Anyways, thank you!