More hacker problems

So it appears some genius up in Alaska was trying to throw thousands of page requests at the Hypothermia  Xbox blog to help drive up the position in the Top 20 Most popular. That IP has been blocked.

Update 4/6/2007: It wasn't actually Hypothermia that was doing the boosting... it was someone from his large and overly-enthusiastic community. We do not hold him responsible, and honestly never thought it was him directly anyhow... Please see the comments on this blog post for his apology. No worries Steve!

It also appears that someone recently (or not) brute-force hacked our mySQL user password... and was trying to join all gamertags against all gamerinfo... As if it isn't hard enough to keep this site running, people are trying to take all of the data that is PUBLICLY AVAILABLE ON XBOX.COM... or through the XCDP...

So I have changed our password on the user account and am sweeping through changing all of the other passwords for forums, admin accounts, login accounts etc... that was EXACTLY how I wanted to spend my day.

For all of you idiots out there trying to game the system... thank you. Steve and I have all the time in the world to undo the messes you are making.

Here we are, running a site for the community, offering APIs of all our data and instead of working with us people are smashing the site with thousands of simultaneous requests, breaking almost everything and ruining it for everyone else.

Update 11:38am CT

I think I have everything changed over... if you notice any site errors due to an incorrect database password, please let me know!

Comments

[Gary_Leeds]

Must admit it looked suspicious last month when he jumped from 9th to 1st in the matter of hours but just thought he added a link to here on a few forum accounts. I think the one IP hit per month would solve that problem but would penalise people with static IPs over the ones with dynamic as they would get a hit each day they look at their blogs where the static ones only get 1 hit per month. Unless you could somehow do it one per day. Or if the IP address matches the last one that looked at a blog then no hit is counted

[Trapper Markelz]

We have IP tracking in place to prevent flooding... but you can always get around that if you are... creative. ;)

[Mark]

Sorry to hear that "hackers" are trying to ruin your hard work and waste your time. I love how you said
"For all you idiots"
lol :)

[lightsup55]

I'm happy being at number 15 for the most popular blogs this month. And how I got there was simple, I put a link in my signature at every forum I go to.

By the way, do hits from the RSS feed count? I have an RSS feed up on my MySpace.com profile.
http://www.myspace.com/lightsup55xbox360

[Trapper Markelz]

Hits from the RSS feed do not count. Only visits to your blog homepage.

[HA Lucky Shot U]

It is lame that some idiot(s) feel the need to trash a good thing. It's been fun to help this site grow by word of mouth and I think people are always going to target good people... It's not funny that they aren't getting caught either.

Lucky

www.hells-inc.com
www.liveassault.com

[Steve]

Hey guys,

This is Steve from over at Hypothermia / HardOCP. I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart for what happened at 360Voice. I respect you guys, what you have done for the community and all the hard work you do.

We have an extremely large community of readers in our forums (www.hardforum.com) and sometimes people get a little carried away. Be that as it may, I accept full responsibility for what happened and I will do my best to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. I have voiced my anger with what happened and let everyone know that is not cool.

If there is any way to disable my profile from EVER being listed in the ranking system at 360Voice again, I would appreciate it if that could be done. If it is not possible, please delete my profile to ensure that something like this will not happen again. As much as I love having a 360Voice profile, I would rather not have one than to cause problems for you and your staff.

Again, I sincerely apologize for the trouble.

Steve
Hypothermia

[Mr Achievement]

Don't remove Hypothermia! It isn't his fault!

I am going to visit your blog everyday now... I can't imagine 360voice without Hypothermia in the top 20 anyways! Keep telling everyone about 360voice... www.hardforum.com is a valuable ally and this has to be helping the site too... I mean any talk about 3v is better tan no talk about 3v! You will make it back to the top... The way you deserve... Legit.