Moderator Account Accessed By 3rd Party

[human1]

thank you, BYC staff!

 

[FluffyBottomBantams]

Thank you BYC staff for kicking this problem in the butt as soon as you did! To your knowledge are all the threads back up and running at this point?

 

[Marie2020]

Everything is under control... No need to worry guys... All accounts are very secure... @Nifty-Chicken is in control and we are getting to the bottom of everything...

go @Nifty-Chicken

 

[CarpCharacin]

To your knowledge are all the threads back up and running at this point?

I think so, all moderator actions are logged so there was a list of the threads that had been soft deleted.

 

[Marie2020]

but I have to say this I kinda laughed when I read that the post is "now shit" excuse my language

Well really, I'm not used to naughty words . But have too admit it was crappy

 

[TheTexasChickenGirl]

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

---

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!

Thank you BYC Staff!! That was super quick and thank you for taking time out of your day to fix it

 

[Marie2020]

Wow @the_peanut_coop I'm already paranoid about my phone's camera watching me! The last thing I needed was to be scared of them finding out my location and secret identity

Or worse catching us out in the loo

 

[Marie2020]

I think someone just always wants to cause stress and worry

Sado's

 

[Marie2020]

I totally agree. I’m quite young myself. Plenty of very kind respectable teens on here.

And old young ladies

 

[Texasclucker]

i left for 45 minutes and 56!? notifications