Hello AP users and friends,

I am very sorry for the downtime we experienced today. There is a long story behind it, and I am not sure of all of the details just yet. I am contacting CoreISP (our host) to try and figure out who is responsible for this.

The short story: The site was hacked.

The longer story: The shoutbox stopped working correctly late last night or this morning, I’m not sure which (I noticed it didn’t load quite right before I headed to class). In class, I hopped online and checked the site and was redirected to a strange third party website that displayed nothing, but a download was offered. According to Zyntax, the site was attempting to download a trojan to a user’s machine.

When I returned from class, I logged into the AP FTP server to find out what was going on. I noticed an extra file inside the forum directory containing what appeared to be some sort of key or password. I also discovered, a bit to my horror, that the blogs, forums, and home page were all modified, and some JavaScript was added to the bottom of them. This script is what was causing the shoutbox to fail, and the page to send the user to a new page.

All the files have been restored, and I hope this is the end of our problem. I am trying to get in touch with Liroy still for log files or any information he might have about the issue.

I’m sorry that this whole incident occurred.

Regards,
Jon C

Looking through all the trackbacks we’ve gotten in the queue here on the blogs, I see it’s a useless feature that is only used by spam bots. And lots of them, at that. So, they’ve been disabled, and all the spam deleted.

If you need to leave comments, feel free to sign up here and post your thoughts. Spam, however, stays out, and I intend to keep it that way.

That is all.

So last night and this morning, I was at Wired’s place, and we did the most epic thing AP has done so far.

We had a jam session. We hooked up the following:

A bass amp
Pair of KRK Rokit RP-8 monitors
Mackie 1202-VLZ mixer
Wired’s laptop (with the Reason 4 demo)
M-Audio Axiom 49
Roland SP-404
Roland Juno-G

We played live mixes of a few things, including Blackout and Foop (have you heard foop yet? no? screw you, I’ll finish it eventually).

We don’t have it recorded yet, but as soon as Wired gets his brand spankin’ new M-Audio MobilePre unit working, we’ll grab a recording for you and post it up. So stay tuned! It’s coming soon!

If you live near us and want to join a jam session, we’ll need to work something out. Like, at a park or something. Yeah.

Until next time, take care! Don’t stop the beat!

Alright, so you PROBABLY noticed that the forums got changed back to the old theme. Yeah, the dark one that was really awesome that we took down because of a new module I installed. Well, it’s back. So enjoy. Because it’s awesome.

Also, the main site got a little redecorating done, and while it is a little bit of a work in progress, still, it’s turning out to be a WHOLE LOT cooler than that boring old blue layout I had made. I’m almost ashamed I made such a horridly boring thing.

This new one’s much better! Dig it, folks!

Spam bots have been all over the place here lately. Should this continue, I may get horribly angry and do something drastic. No, not close down the blogs. More like, go on a crusade against you jerkoffs who are sapping the bandwidth I pay for. Yes. I PAY FOR IT. NOT YOU. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ABUSE THIS SPACE. All who want to PARTICIPATE and BE NICE and APPROPRIATE and NOT ADVERTISE USELESS GARBAGE are welcome. Humans, that is. But if all you are is a bot, or you can do nothing but spam piles of crap, GET THE HELL OFF.

By the way, if HUMANS are accidentally banned due to you morons, then I’m sorry. You ruined it for them. So I really shouldn’t apologize. You should. You got them banned. I’m sick of all this crap. So CUT IT OUT ALREADY.