Yesterday I was reading webhostingtalk, a thread about members of the forum being mass-spammed by some fella who was throwing around virii. I took a bunch of information from the thread, googled it, looked over the ascii data i could find in the binary that was being thrown by the hacker, and found this extremely informative post about the exact same virus that was being sent to wht members.

So, i registered a new account, ‘ub3rhelps’ just to direct people to the link, only to have my account banned, and my post deleted. The only informative post in the thread, deleted and barred from distribution. This bothered me greatly, because I am a strong proponent of open information, and because this information would be helpful to many people. So, I registered several followup accounts, about 10 of them, and posted / banned / re-registered rapidly for about 15 minutes, with each account being shot down by a new moderator every time, with their banning speed getting faster and faster.

Eventually, I got tired of it, so I quit. Then about 15 minutes later I got a call from somebody at the phone number 616-916-1975 screaming his head off about how I’m a maggot, and how I should be in kalamazoo fighting him instead of trolling his forum. Sure enough, it was long-time associate dennis aka softwarerevue, irrate about the fact that I had the nerve to register on his forum and post. Even though my initial effort was extremely helpful to his forum’s existence, he was still upset. He hung up on me before I had a chance to explain, so I redialed him about 4 times and tried to have a civil conversation with him, but the only thing he could tell me was that I’m a maggot, I’m a waste of space and I shouldn’t be on the planet.

About 5 minutes later My boss Karl called me to let me know that I should probably quit trolling wht, so I agreed to let up for a while. He also told me that dennis would like me to be at hostingcon this year so he can punch me in the face.

Awesome.

The man I’ve given countless hours of free technical support to now believes that I’m a horrible person, simply because I registered a few accounts, only 1 of which was truly malicious. Am I realy doing harm by registering and getting banned? It’s not like i’m packeting his forum, or attacking it. I’m simply registernig and posting some jokes. What’s wrong with that? Honestly, if anything it’s entertainment for the forum.

Yesterday, My boss emailed me and let me know that I need to stop registering and posting on wht from our office, because Dennis (softwarerevue) called and let them know that if I do it again, that they’ll ban our office ip ranges.

This is pretty interesting, because I haven’t trolled wht from work in several weeks. I quit doing this from work for the benefit of my coworkers / bosses who continue to post on their forum.

Upon hearing this, I regged a new account from home, “srsly not ub3r” and posted a thread entitled “hey dennis”:

Maybe if your administration made logical decisions I wouldn’t have to reg and tell the people how to seek retribution. Also, nice job calling my boss to try and make me lose my job. I haven’t logged on from work in weeks, and quit specifically for the benefit of my boss and the other employees who chose to post on your ‘powered by liability’ forum. Every little post i’ve made has been done from home, on an open wifi connection that has no static ip address, and is being continually shifted throughout the greater chicago area within comcast’s network. Good luck banning those ip’s, you’ll piss off a good number of people if you put those ranges down.

But, i’m concerned with dennis’ priorities. His forum is on the verge of being sued & fined by a giant flock of extremely powerful companies who have a very valid reason to make inet interactive non-existent, and dennis has still found time to handle my trolling of his forum.

I know troy augustine has money, but is inet really prepared to shovel out the thousands, possibly millions of dollars these companies are likely to be grabbing for in the distant future?

Trolling isn’t a crime. It’s free speech, and I’m going to do it for as long as I want from the comfort of my home. There isn’t anything anyone can do to stop me. Except for tha attacker guy, the next time he forces the moderators to close wht, i’ll probably giggle, and proceed to troll it 24 hours after they reopen with their pathetic explanation.

I feel like continuing to talk about wht despite my ban because I work in this industry, and depend on it for my livelihood. My income depends on webhosting, I am completely financially independent & rely on absolutely no one other than this company for money to live. WHT has made itself a cornerstone of the industry, and it’s destruction would have a large affect on the industry’s stability.

A lot of things are being said. Let’s go over a few of the points being made:

1) “Rackspace should be blamed for not securing WHT completely!”
This is bullshit. Rackspace cannot be held accountable for the security of webhostingtalk.com’s website, or any of inet’s other properties. At the most, they should be responsible for the security of the software the server was provisioned with, and nothing more. I personally believe that WHT was compromised as a result of weak security within the applications that were written my inet’s developers.

2) “Why did prohacker write that database with credit card verification data stored within it!?”
I don’t believe mat was the person who wrote the database. I believe it was written by an ex-employee of iNet, Jeremy Johnstone. Jeremy has since gone on to work for yahoo. But, as an observer of the credit card dump, jeremy’s records are near the top of the database, which leads me to believe mat had no responsibility in the creation. However, he should have removed the database as soon as he discovered it, or at the very least, the moment WHT was compromised the first time.

3) “This is the second time in recent history that wht has been hacked!”
Actually, it’s the third. I believe the same people were responsible, too.

4) Separation of resources
I’m beginning to think WHT is operating their database servers at rackspace, and their webserver at softlayer. If this is the case, it’s going to cripple performance for the forum, because the routing between rackspace and softlayer is sub-par, and as a result, the whole web/db transaction is going to be much slower in comparison to a transaction where the db & web server are on the same network. Additionally, it’s going to eat a lot of bandwidth.

5) “WHY DENNIS WHY!?”
Dennis, like any 57 year old, really isn’t a server admin, or a programmer. He’s only the public voice of wht’s administration. He’s taking the things people say to him too personally, and the public are taking his answers as his literal answer, and dennis should simply be forwarding the public’s inquiries to the applicable developer(s) within inet. I’ll admit, I was guilty here, because I gave him a hard time on MSN about the verification codes being in the database, but he should be more clear about his role of messenger.

That’s all for now. Have a good one. Also, my ownership & direction of manchildren.org to WHT should not be interpreted as a security threat. If you believe this, you are a living idiot, and have no business operating any type of hosting business.

Did you hear about CVV & CVV2 data being illegally recorded in their database, and subsequently released along with cc’s, expiration dates, names, and every other record inet had in their database?