Roofers Coffee Shop Forum is Down

May 10th, 2008 — Roofing Contractor Info

Roofers Coffee ShopAccording to a message at the Roofers Coffee Shop they are having issues with a worm attack and have had to close down the forums. Worm attacks frequently scan the Internet for vulnerabilities in server software and it appears they have found one here.

We are not sure what the problem is. The webmaster, Steve Miller, had been testing for a bug in the forum software yesterday. A test post that Steve submitted reveals javascript code had been injected into both the subject and message body. The script originates from a Chinese website. That website appears to have been hacked into also.

Another problem I have noticed is that Yahoo Search has red-flagged the RCS website as potentially harmful. The warning states that RCS has been issuing unsolicited emails. Unclear if this problem is related to the worm attack or not, but it is clear that Steve has his hands full and we wish him luck in resolving this.

UPDATE May 13th, 2008: The forum came back online today. Source of the problem was a Chinese worm attack which caused the RCS to dump all of their forum threads and replies. Other areas of the site are gone as well, classifieds, manufacturer information, forum profiles, etc.

The worm found its way into the system through a security hole in the forum software which allowed users to actually post javascript code. This is never a good thing. Most forum software only allows for minimal Html to be posted (links or image tags) and the rest are safely filtered. It appears that their fix is not to allow any Html at all — no more smilies.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under Roofing Contractor Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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3 Comments so far

  1. Mike on May 10, 2008 8:32 pm

    I sure hope they find the source of the worm.

  2. Roof Info Staff on May 11, 2008 5:35 am

    Me too, Mike.

    Finding the hole in security may be the easier of the two problems however. If the site gets onto any of the various spam lists, it can be quite hard to get off of them.

  3. darvenginzks on August 3, 2008 4:13 am

    I’ve recently joined and wanted to introduce myself :)

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