Avsim Destroyed!!

[N400QW]

Folks,

Today, AVSIM was destroyed by a hacker. Both of our primary servers were hacked and the partition tables destroyed, and that will be very difficult to overcome. I won’t speculate on who did it, but we will have a forensic done on our disks and scrutinize the logs to validate our suspicions.

I would appreciate if you could post the following as a news item or announcement on your websites or forums. Nels and Francois, I know we have been competitors, but I would very much appreciate you posting this on your web sites, if you could.

PRESS RELEASE: AVSIM Hacked!!

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks. END

Best Regards,
Tom Allensworth

[=Hollywood=]

Thanks for posting that, I wonder why anyone would do such a terrible thing...

[N400QW]

Hackers and cyber terrorists lack any sort of decency, kindness, respect, integrity, etc.
Scumbag is term that springs to mind.

Metro, you may be unaware but AVsim and this site recently buried the hatchet.
Have you considered that Avsim provides real services to the FS Community just as Nels site does?
Try to consider something besides your own selfish view for a moment.

[N400QW]

Metro, you may despise Avsim but your attitude reveals an even deeper lack of respect for the FS Community.
Frankly, this is not about you or your low opinion of others but rather about a loss to the FS Community at large.
Why not drop the ego and considers others for a bit.

[N400QW]

Originally Posted by metro752

AVSIM was run by shady individuals, and harbored even shadier folks.

I happen to personally know a number of the individuals you slander and I don't stutter when I call you a flat out liar to your face. Clear enough?

[Smiffy]

Ron, Sorry to hear about your situation, I hope you can get everything back up and running in due course. Hopefully the assole(s) that did this to your servers can be located and charged

[VERT002]

This is terrible news. Flightsim.com and AVSIM are (or were) my two main sources of new FS information. I hope that AVSIM can get back in business soon. Thanks to Tom Allensworth and everyone at AVSIM for their work.
Let's hope that Flightsim.com is not the hackers next target.

[Tony G]

Metro, in all the time I;ve been away from fs.com, I'm sad to see you still being the same guy you were.

This attack on avsim is an attack on flightsimmers around the world, shame to see you being happy about it, but your were always a little twisted. Get a grip.


Shame on the offenders about what they've done, and I hope that avsim will recover from this.

flightsim.com is still the best site out there, but for any site to be the best, there must be competition with it, and that's what avsim provides.

[Leanne]

This is totally devastating news for our community! I don't care for politics, rivalries and such, but I do care that such a valuable resource to us all has been destroyed by an individual who can only be described as pure scum

My thoughts are with the AVSIM team who have worked tirelessly to bring the library online on new servers all week... don't give up guys, your work is valued by countless enthusiasts the world over - many of us 'silently' appreciative most of the time.

[angels355]

Tom,

If the partitions were erased, there might still be hope of a recovery. I'm not an expert on reading data on a disk with no partitions but I know it is possible.


Loki perhaps you could comment.

Tom, are you in communication with Avsim leaders? I'm sending you a PM with a link to a forensic tools website. There's freeware, and different types of pro-ware. Avsim experts should examine the tools on this software and see if it can be used to recover the data.

What in the world happened to the backups at Avsim??? Tell me they have offsite backups of the data?? Fly fans are going to be especially upset.

Keep a cool head and send the Avsim leaders/experts the link I send you and see if the data can be recovered. If Avsim doesn't have the expertise, contact the PhD's in computer science at the best university available to you, such as MIT.