vBulletin 3 Status Update

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  • Kier
    Former Lead Developer, vBulletin
    • Sep 2000
    • 8179

    vBulletin 3 Status Update

    D-DoS Attacks Upon vBulletin.com

    From Friday October 31st, vBulletin.com has been the target of distributed denial of service attacks originating from a person intent on extortion. Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday night saw massive attacks that were sufficient in size to cripple an entire sub-net of our hosting provider's network, and filled the connecting pipes with 150mb/s of incoming junk traffic.

    Having refused to meet the demands of the attacker, on Wednesday at around 18:00 GMT the attacks were resumed after two relatively quiet days, causing vBulletin.com and all other sites hosted on this server to go offline again. However, after communication with WorldPay, who have also suffered DDoS attacks this week, we had a list of IP addresses known to be zombie computers. These IP addresses were blocked from reaching the server, along with any other IPs that looked to be attacking. By 21:00 GMT the attack had been blocked to a point where vBulletin.com became available to visitors once again.

    An unfortunate side-effect of blocking large ranges of IP addresses is that many legitimate customers may currently be blocked from reaching vBulletin.com. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible, and extend our apologies to any customer who is unable to reach us. At this point we can only say that it is better for a small percentage of customer to be unable to gain access than for no customers to be able to do so. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

    We have gained considerable knowledge about our attacker through various means, and we are coordinating with our hosts, the FBI in the US and the NHTCU in the UK in order to persue him and remove his means of attacking us.

    vBulletin 3

    Last week we promised to announce a date for the Release Candidate of vBulletin 3, advancing our previous estimate of late November. As a result of the development significant time wasted in defending against the DDoS attacks mentioned above, I am afraid that we will be unable to meet the deadline we had expected to announce this week. However, I am pleased to say that work is progressing extremely well, and we are still confident that the next vBulletin 3 release will be made in late November.

    In order to meet this late November deadline, we have decided to call the next release Gamma instead of Release Candidate 1. This is in recognition of the fact that there will undoubtably be minor bugs relating to the inclusion of a completely new style and totally rewritten templates. This gamma release will happen as soon as the style and language changes are complete, and is on schedule for a late November release, with Release Candidate 1 to follow shortly afterwards.

    The gamma release will contain the new style and language-independent templates.

    vBulletin 2.3.3

    With the delay in releasing vBulletin 3, and a number of known issues with the vBulletin 2.3.x series, we have decided to do a maintenance release of vBulletin 2.3.3 in order to patch up a few bugs that, while not critical, should nonetheless be fixed.

    We hope to release vBulletin 2.3.3 to the members' area next week.
  • Kier
    Former Lead Developer, vBulletin
    • Sep 2000
    • 8179

    #2
    I forgot to mention it earlier, but we must say a big thank you to Steve Merkel and others from Ventures Online, who have been very helpful in dealing with these attacks.

    Comment

    • Kier
      Former Lead Developer, vBulletin
      • Sep 2000
      • 8179

      #3
      A discussion of this thread is happening here:

      Comment

      • Steve Machol
        Former Customer Support Manager
        • Jul 2000
        • 154488

        #4
        Here is an update of the Gamma status posted by Kier on this thread:



        Regarding when Gamma will be released...

        I will be away for a week starting on the 5th of December, and if we don't have it released by then we won't have enough testing time to get a final release out for Christmas and that would throw off all my development plans for next year meaning I would have to do something evil to myself.

        So I would put money on Gamma being released before December 5th.
        Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
        Change CKEditor Colors to Match Style (for 4.1.4 and above)

        Steve Machol Photography


        Mankind is the only creature smart enough to know its own history, and dumb enough to ignore it.


        Comment

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