Mad Members

I am a member of this gaming forum so I know the full story. One member was given moderator status, then he promptly went mad and started deleting half the message board! After being unceremoniously booted off, he returned after a few months with his latest stunt. Ive only included the necessary posts. Read on.

Nutty Ex Mod: SOMEONE IS DELETING POSTS! STOP HIM QUICK !

Forum Member: Eh? Whats is that about?

Forum Member 2: Look at the date of the posts on the forum - the newest post seems to be from Tuesday - there are several days missing. Something's gone wonky with the board. Aside from the mad spammers, where are all the new posts? Its like we've had an old backup restored. Either that or someone is pressing 'delete thread' iinstead of 'delete post' when they've been spammed.

Forum Member 1: Why are you doing this? its easy to see who you really are.

Nutty Ex Mod: HA HA HA! ROOOLZZZ! WAREZ IS GOOD!!!! I AM THE MOD GOD!


Forum Member 2: Yup, 'AlbertSweet' is quite clearly messing with the forum. Idiot.

Member 3: Where is 'AlbertSweet' based? Under British law, he can be prosecuted, if Imagine fancy doing that. Here's hoping they're keeping back-ups of the board—I know most organisations don't tend to.

Member 1: There was a lot of nasty posts this morning from 'AlbertSweet' that I deleted first thing (very sick stuff). Would be a big coincidence if it is unrelated.

Member 4: Look at my post count! Took me YONKS to get over 1000 - and its been halved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thats a HUGE amount of threads that have been deleted

Member 1: I had just reached 4,000


Member 3: At some point earlier today the title of this thread was "MOD IS DELETING POSTS". If that was edited in by the 'AlbertSweet' thing, then he definitely had illicit moderator/admin rights, and as such could certainly be done for hacking.

Member 1: I changed the title of the thread when I got on the site this morning and notice my name being used.

Nutty Ex Mod (under another name): I have a bad feeling about this... the office was left unattended last night for a while as there was a 'situation' on the ward - I was logged into here at the time. IF (and its a BIG if) a savy patient got in and had access to the PC (while I was in the middle of a 3-team restraint of another patient down the corridor - don't ask ) then I am in big trouble on two counts - with the forum team and with my workplace.
I will endeavor to try and find out tonight but am not logging in to any site on my works PC again and if this is the cause, would be too embarrassed and guilt ridden to show my face on these boards again. I can only apologise.

Member 2: If it was a patient at your hospital then how would they know about certain incidents on this forum?

Member 1: That's a good point. Unless they had his password written down in big red felt tip with "RG FORUM PASSWORD" next to it by his computer, it seems a hacker is more likely than a patient.

Savvy Member: Hi. I have forum backups for the last couple of weeks. However I want to try and avoid rolling it back completely -- I will try to merge in posts that have vanished.


Nutty Ex Mod: Are you implying its my HOME pc that could be the cause ?? F**k this for a game of chess. I have Zonealarm running though and it updates automatically every so often, so surely that would stop any hijacking of my PC by a third party to acces passwords, keyloggers

Savvy Member: The 'AlbertSweet' posts were from your home IP address - not either of the computers you use at work. Perhaps you have a virus on your computer being remotely controlled. ZoneAlarm will not detect that - it's just a firewall. Perhaps try a proper virus killer. I think Trend does a free over-the-web scan.

MMember 3: Hang on... those posts were actually made from his personal home IP?? That sounds far more sinister than a mere virus. Spyware programs are technically unable to invoke a local web session, and it can't be a proxy trojan either as it wouldn't have the right cookies set.
Either his home computer has been directly *physically* compromised, or some fairly sophisticated remote-access software has been deliberately placed on there by someone with a motive. Either way it's sounding increasingly dodgy, I wouldn't clean any potential "evidence" off the PC in question just yet.

Savvy Member: OK - once I get the go-ahead I will roll the forum back, re-upgrade it and try to merge in the posts since.

Drama ends.