Forum Status

[Lking]

As some of you may have noticed the SpamCop forum has been a little "squirrely" this weekend (sense Friday, 8 April).

The short story is that the host for the forum suspected a security breach of their servers and deleted ALL Admin/Moderator privileges/accounts from ALL forum they host.

That host wide problem has been resolved, our (SpamCop forum) accounts, and privileges, have been restored, the spam from Friday removed and things on the forum should be back to the normal level of chaos.

If you see anything from over the weekend that needs to be cleaned up, let me know.

The community help provided to other, while I was persona non grata, is greatly appreciated, by all. Truly a user-to-user process.

[lisati]

Thank you for the update. Based on the error message I saw and my inability to access the forum, I suspected that something of that nature might have been amiss. It's good to know that things are heading in the general direction of "normal" - whatever normal is.

[Richard W]

I just want to follow up a little bit with what Lou had to say. As many of you have noted, it has been a rough few weeks around SpamCop. Believe me though, it's been tougher on this side of the screen than on your side.

With all the security breaches and break ins and data thefts, everyone is concentrating on security. There has been huge increases in spam in recent weeks from exploits in all the major CMS software, including Joomla, WordPress and others.

This means anything scripting, such as php, cgi, or whatever is suspect. Our back end teams are pouring through code looking for anything that might be suspect and making changes. Of course with all the inter-dependencies in SpamCop those changes will sometimes unexpectedly break things. That's what is behind things like the not finding links issue, html display issues, etc.

It's a time consuming process but it is all being done to maintain the integrity and security of SpamCop. Fixing some of the breaks will always be prioritized along with all projects underway, so sometimes they are going to take longer than normal. They are all being tracked and will be fixed.

Cisco remains committed to SpamCop and SpamCop is a very important part of their security operations. This includes SpamCop being part of the Talos group at talosintel.com, where we are part of Cisco's overall security research, response and development team.

Richard