PunkTorrents News

[Liz]

Hello to all,

As you may or may not have noticed: PunkTorrents is down!

Last Friday L**** got mail from our ISP that a certain IP, connected to PT, was used for Brute-force SSH-attacks. I scanned the forum to see who was connected to that IP and I found that an account with the name O**** had used that IP. I banned and purged the account and blocked the IP via the server from the firewall.

The ISP had been blocking the site and after L**** send a message to the provider (in which we also asked what else we could do), they dropped the abuse complaint and we were back in business after a while (site was difficult to reach because of all the connections it had to re-establish).

Monday morning we got a new message from H**** (our ISP) that there were still abuse complaints coming in. And after a little while they shut down PT completely. I was able to get behind the scene before that happened and I noticed, when I tried a different way to block that IP, that it gave an error stating that this IP belonged to PT itself. I found that a bit strange, but I didn't think much of it.

I asked L**** again to ask H**** what we could do about it. They just told us that they shut the site down and that they were willing to investigate BUT ... the first half hour would be free after that the meter would be running. I told L**** that they could do whatever they thought necessary, but that we would not be able to pay for extra costs. They told us that if the problem was on their side, they wouldn't charge anything. But they also told us that the OS of our server was so old it couldn't be updated and that it was basically unprotected. Would it be worth doing it?

They asked for the root password and send us a link so we could get into the server and when I looked again, I noticed that the IP was the one with which PT was registered. So I could not ban that IP: it would block the tracker and all.

I contacted B**** and M**** to see what we could do. And this is their answer:

B****: "... it looks like the server is trying to be hacked. The backend is old and out of date and makes a good target. We talked about this before. Unfortunately unless the server back end can be updated and the site still work I don’t know what we can do. I knew it was a matter of time before things would crash. I was hoping it would have been longer than this. Unfortunately unless we can find someone that can update server and make sure PT still works I am at a loss"

M****: "The only thing I can think of is ask H**** for a way to resolve this.

They may all be working from home and had to shut you down.

But you have a dedicated server with the ddos obviously affecting their bandwidth.\

Just put in a ticket to them and how do you get this fixed.

Let them know that fixing it is beyond your technical knowledge."

I haven't moved on (yet) after this. H**** asked for a root password and I don't have enough knowledge where to find it. And we haven't put in a ticket ... yet.

B**** is right: this is what we've been talking about and that's all it was ... talking. I tried to find O**** and M**** and they both moved on. Even if we can fix this, we still have no tech guy to maintain the site properly and we don't have the financial resources to fix it.

We can ask H**** to try and fix it and spent the little money we have. If we can get it back online we can ask for donations, but I doubt if people are willing to invest in this mess.