EZBoard loses postings in hacker attack

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Bulletin board hoster loses postings in hacker attack

By Cara Garretson, Network World

Ezboard, hosting service to hundreds of thousands of online bulletin boards, suffered a hacker attack on Memorial Day that permanently erased countless postings.

Unlike a typical attack that aims to bring down a service for boasting rights or steal sensitive information to be used in identity theft, the goal of the Ezboard breach appears to have solely been to erase historical postings stored on the company’s servers.

“Someone decided to erase data from our users’ boards and unfortunately really hurt a lot of innocent people,” says Robert Labatt, CEO of Ezboard, which hosts a wide variety of sites including common-interest and support groups. “I have received e-mails from mothers, cancer patients, people upset with the impact this is having on their lives. With the loss of the posts, a lot of emotions went with them.”

Ezboard has some ideas about who might be behind the attack, Labatt says, and is pursuing all possibilities with the help of the FBI. The company is also offering a $5,000 reward to anyone with information that leads to the direct arrest and conviction of the hacker.

The company is not ruling out the possibility of the hacker being an insider. “There’s a big different between script kiddies and malicious intent. It’s more likely whoever came in here was not a script kiddie,” Labatt says.

As part of its hosting service, Ezboard employs over 200 servers that store production and back-up data, and would not specify how many of them had postings erased in the attack. Labatt won’t specify what security measures the company had in place. “Things you would imagine an organization like ours should have in place we have in place,” he says. The company will undergo a security and back-up audit over the next few weeks, Labatt told Ezboard users in an e-mail.

Upon discovering the attack, Ezboard immediately began data restoration processes, although the company warns that it will be impossible to restore all data to all boards. As of Tuesday afternoon, no one server that lost data in the attack had been completely restored.

The company does not believe financial or other sensitive information was taken in the breach, since Ezboard stores that data separately.

[url=\"http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/060805-ezboard-hack.html?fsrc=netflash-rss\"]source: Network World[/url]