The Magic Cafe Hacked

[Tom Frame]

If all manner of trolls and clueless seekers with silly screen names begin making vacuous posts here, it may be because the Magic Cafe has been hacked.

[Richard Kaufman]

Tom, I just looked over there and didn't see any evidence of hacking.
What did you see?

[Smurf]

It was definitely hacked. I saw it too. The hacker had a vacuous message. The hacker name was DasTN.

[CraigOusterling]

It was only the front page as far as I could tell. If you had a link past that page they worked, so a lot of people didn't even know it was down.

[Chris Aguilar]

The cafe runs on an ancient version of phpBB (same forums software as used by myself for my CN forums and -more recently- the Genii forums)

In its early days, phpBB had a ton of security issues. Eventually, they did the right thing and hired a top notch security auditing firm to audit their code. Since then, the security issues have pretty much evaporated and phpBB is very secure.

However, the ancient codebase of the cafe (albeit heavily modified) probably doesn't not have the advantage of the code audit that more stock versions do.

I'm honestly surprised they don't get hacked more often.

[Bill Marquardt]

I am not positive that we are talking about the same thing, but when I turned on my iPad which had Safari "open" and set to the Magic Cafe this morning, a page popped up declaring that my system had been hacked. It was obviously the work of some juvenile idiot as he had an anime character's picture and used some silly name. I was warned, "Don't mess with me."

No doubt the perp is some kid alone in his bedroom fulfilling his delusions of grandeur because he knows how to use someone else's malicious software to break into message boards.

I cannot give more specifics because I deleted the page quickly without paying a whole lot of attention to it.

[Jonathan Townsend]

image of the hacked page?

[CraigOusterling]

JT - It looked like this: (I use chrome with ghostery so it's a minimal looking thing)

[Jonathan Townsend]

Thanks Craig,
looks like a boring pointless hack - but they did have a rabbit on their artwork.

[CraigOusterling]

Bill, not to worry, it wasn't targeted at you. It was a graphic on themagiccafe.com front page.

And a poor hack at that. Just the frontpage? More than likely it was a lazy kid using a BOT that reached the t's instead of actually targeting the site themselves.

Sciptkiddies!!!... oye... use yer time moore prooducteevily. Go ootside n play or build something material... yoo useless lil fahrts.