WARNING! How a PBeM was nearly killed... From: "Laura Walker" <help@arolosweyr.zzn.com> Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 15:13:57 +0000 For all the mistakes a computer can make there is no match for the trust or forgetfulness of the human brain to REALLY mess things up. I'm telling you this as a reminder of "Why you should take good care of even insignificant passwords" I help run a Pern PBeM called Arolos Weyr. At present its the largest and busiest game on YahooGroups, its approved, spans over several lists (about 16) in order to cut down mail to the main list and all in all the five main moderators (we now have mods assistants due to work overload..) are rather proud of it. Last Friday, to all appearances they began disappearing. One by one they were deleted from YahooGroups - or so it seemed - leaving the mods panicked, wondering if we'd done something that caused us to be banned from YahooGroups, YahooGroups had had a database hiccup or... what? Luckily for us, we always believed in being prepared for an emergancy. A contingency meeting was set up, and using a backup of the memberlist a temporary emergancy list was set up on someones computer. I contacted the List Manager list and through this got an actual YahooGroups employee (Not customer service but a technician) and meanwhile we were gathering information to work out what had actually happened. What we worked out was this. Before Egroups became YahooGroups the profile I use for it was only used for Geocities. I kept nothing REALLY important on it, using it mainly to work on a few pages for a friend of mine who also used to be a mod on Arolos Weyr. That "friend" left several weeks ago to set up a rival Weyr having decided all the Arolos mods were against her. (Very untrue - she was in fact just about offered the world in order to stay) Due to the fact the pages were for her she had the password to my Yahoo account.... And after looking at the Activity Logs SOMEONE came in through my profile to do as much damage as they possibly could (Thankfully we discovered that as NONE of the mods has total mod privs for ALL of the groups they were not all deleted. Some were deleted, some had all members unsubscribed, some had files deleted and for those in which she could do nothing else I was unsubscribed) We can't prove it was her. She is the only one who had the password unless she gave it to someone else. Fortunetly with YahooGroups help (and they really were wonderful about it. They combed through their logs and undid the damage) we were set back on track and my password has now been changed. So, the warning stands. When changing your Egroups profile to Yahoo change your password even if the only other person who has it is someone who was given it several months ago so you think they'll have forgotten it by now. Even if you think they would never do something so spiteful or petty. Personally my own trust has undergone a severe knock from this. Last Friday I saw my fellow mods alternitely go through anger, upset and neartears because we weren't sure we were going to get our group back. Someone breaking a trust for a little revenge came damn near to causing a nervous breakdown at least one person who was had way too much to cope with over the last few weeks. If I could prove who did it I'd have them knocked of their ISP in seconds. As it is I'm spreading the warning so if anyone here hasn't yet converted from Egroups to Yahoo they won't forget like I did. By the way this story does have a happy ending. Following us being UNhacked we had a sudden rush of members which in fact now puts us ABOVE the number we had beforehand. Which I imagine is a big annoyance for the person concerned ;-) Laura Arolos BoD -- Arolos Weyr is now the biggest Pern PBeM on YahooGroups! To join send a mail to ArolosWeyr-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or look at our site at www.ArolosWeyr.co.uk Referenced By Up