Flight Simulation News ^{Got News?}

It is not often that we bring particular attention to AVSIM Volunteers (they normally get big BY LINES and a pay increase), but the events of the last 16 days demand that we do so. The AVSIM Editorial Staff would like to put the shine of the public spotlight on these hard working guys, so that you know the team that put the AVSIM Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Matt Johnson: Matt joined AVSIM in 2000 and brought a technical genius to our team that we never dreamed we would ever have. Matt designed the AVSIM File Library system from scratch as there were no "off the shelf" library software available at the time that would either meet our needs or survive under the load that the community would put on it. Matt was AVSIM's Technical Manager up until the middle of 2008 when his real world job took all his attention and time away from AVSIM. On Wednesday, May 13th, the morning after the hack, Matt stepped up and volunteered to help us bring the AVSIM system back online. Living near London, England, Matt worked his magic in support of the other team members from afar and was critical to the system being back online today.

John Binner: John is a former U.S. Marine Corps Air Traffic Controller and AVSIM's hardware guy. John had been very involved with the set up of the IPB forums back in November, 2008 and throughout the Christmas break. Before that, John spent countless hours making sure that the staff did not do a "FUBAR" on the system. John was the "go to guy" in all things related to the system and other critical management functions at AVSIM. John has also been a key contributor to the success of the AVSIM FANCONS, starting with our event in San Diego way back when. John left AVSIM earlier this year, but when the hack occurred, he stood up and volunteered to help us get the system back online. John volunteered to go and do whatever it took to get the AVSIM system back and in operation, including sacrificing the entire Memorial Day weekend. He spent the entire holiday camped out in Herndon, Virgina - a long way away from his family and home in South Carolina.

Stanly Thompson-Harmon: What can we say? Stan is the consummate geek. Were pocket protectors still in vogue, Stan would probably own one for ever day of the week (we think he has a couple of dozen stashed in his desk but is afraid to show them). Stan is an engineer for a top two defense firm in the U.S., and breaths and speaks computer code. Stan has put in countless hours since before the hack, looking into the issues we were having with GREEN's bad partition. Stan sacrificed his memorial day weekend too to get AVSIM back in a condition that would allow us to get the system online this week.

The Un-Named One: For security reasons, we are unable to name a special assist from a person or persons in recovering the data on GREEN, PURPLE and the NAS. With their special forensics talents, AVSIM was able to restore all of the web site, all of the forums and we anticipate 90% of the library including all FSX and FS9 files. We expect to be able to serve files dating back to FS98. Thank you UNKNOWN GUY for your assistance and skills.

Matt, John and Stan came together and put humpty dumpty back together again. With the overwhelming help of the community, AVSIM is bigger, better, and faster than ever, and now armed with a system ready to tackle the future growth and expansion of the AVSIM community. From all of the AVSIM staff and a couple of thousand AVSIM Community members, thank you guys! Bravo Zulu!

Greetings,
We are pleased to announce the ' 757 Captain' (-200, -300, Freighter) version 4.3 (FSX) is available!
For details please visit: http://www.captainsim.com

Our team at the NOC are reporting that the contents of WWW.AVSIM.COM may be recoverable. Data for *.net (the library and the forums) and *.org are still TBD.

What this means is that the web site and its reviews, history, and all of our hosted sites may be able to be brought back online sooner than we had anticipated. I am still concerned about the forums and the team is working on the library. Everything depends on how much damage was done to the NAS.

I have just received some very good news. With a lot of help from individuals pulling together from around the world, including experts in data recovery, we have been able to confirm that the web site will be brought back and so too will the forums. We are transferring data, as I write this, to a temporary storage unit and that process will take most of the night. Once we have the data in the storage system, we will then transition the entire web site and forums on to the new servers.

"We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks...".

I want to provide everyone with a non-technical view of what took place yesterday and last night so that some of the rumors that are already starting to spread are corrected.

During the early evening yesterday, we noticed that some alarming things were starting to happen on our servers. The first sign of an issue was that some functionality disappeared on our web server. That progressed to not being able to access the web server via FTP or SSH. Finally, the web/forum server tripped offline. Next the library/email server started to exhibit issues. We went in to reboot it, and that is when it failed entirely. The partitions on both of the servers had been removed. We shut down both servers until we can get a technical member up to our Network Operations Center (NOC), and do a comprehensive inspection of the damage.

I have seen some rumors and speculation already on the various forums in the community, and I would like to make sure that everyone knows the facts. Here are some:

Early in the evening, I sent out a bulk email to all forum members letting them know that we anticipate shutting down the Web/Forum server for a period of time. About a third of the way through the process of sending that email to all 60,000 forum members, the hacker succeeded in bringing the server down. The email was did not get sent to everyone. The reason I sent the email, based on what we knew at that time, was because that a minimum, we would need to shut the web/forum server down to inspect the unit and do repairs. At the time the email was sent, we were unaware that a hack was in progress and that our system would be taken offline entirely. There were no hoaxes involved, as some have asserted.

Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers BETWEEN servers. That is, GREEN, our library server, would be backed up to PURPLE, our WEB/Forum server. That way, if one or the other failed, we would have a back up on the remaining active server. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.