Inappropriate Spam Private Messages

[Brandon Martus]

On behalf of chiefdelphi.com, I want to apologize for the vulgar private messages that were sent out to many of you Thursday evening. The forums were attacked, and some accounts were taken advantage of, and used to send out the inappropriate spam. I was unable to get to a computer, and the moderators wouldn't have been able to handle the massive attack that was going on. (2-3 requests per second, on multiple accounts, creating literally thousands of private messages)

The attack all came from one IP address, so I have banned that IP from the whole site. This should slow things down for now. Once I get back from IRI I will go through and fix an issue that may have prevented this.

How can you prevent this from happening? Don't have your username and password set to the same value. Go change your password now. Go change it regularly. Make it secure (letters, numbers, symbols, lowercase, uppercase, etc.).

I have gone through and removed the few thousand private messages (just the text) from the system. You may still see them listed in your inbox -- the body of the message will no longer show. Unfortunately, during this process some newer (thursday evening) private messages that weren't part of this attack may have been lost. If you sent a message Thursday night via PM, you may want to re-send it, just to be sure.

Again, sorry for the inapproriate content. There are measures in place to prevent this type of thing, but some always will slip through. Unfortunately this happened at a time when it couldn't be dealt with fast enough.

Let me know if you still have any issues with private messages, and I will try to fix them asap.