BOARD4ALL FORUM UPDATE: December 2022

[Root Admin 7749]

New readers can get the background info here from this old announcement banner.

I am ZEUS, the original owner of the Board4all forum. The staff member with the nickname CHALLENGER from Board4all is my son and the lady with the nick Markat is my grand-daughter.

Many members from this forum and Board4All keep asking me why I do not remove that defamatory banner put up by "Challenger" at the top of the Board4All home page. The answer is quite simple. If I remove it, then he would simply put it up again. If I banned him from the forum then he could very well start another forum and then attempt to cause a split among the members at Board4All by trying to take some members along with him. Furthermore, I decided that since the members there already know who I really am, it didn't matter to me whether that banner remained up there or not. This is not the main reason for this announcement, though.

The main reason I am making this post is to warn everyone that "Challenger" intends to sell off the Board4All.biz domain after a series of 3 massive hacks which completely compromised the Board4All forum leaving it down for the whole of last month.

 

After a great deal of coaxing from my side that we needed to be transparent and that we OWED to the forum members to let them know the truth, Challenger decided to put up an announcement on the 30th of October last month, confessing that the VNC server on the hosting server was compromised due to a vulnerability:

(Of course, Challenger decided to change his mind and then silently removed the announcement from the forum after 3-4 days, but by then, all the members had already read it)

What actually happened was that the attackers gained remote access to the hosting server through the vulnerable VNC server and managed to install APTs after dumping the forum database and installing several additional backdoors.

Due to this, it was impossible to recover the server from the recent backups and the server was temporarily brought back online with the 2-month OLD database backups from the 21st of October 2022.

All the forum users' details including their IP addresses, device signatures (used to fingerprint users to check for double/duplicate/multiple accounts) among other PII were completely compromised and fell into the hands of the attackers.

It was much worse for the users who used their mobile phones to login to the Board4All site, as complete identifying fingerprint data from their phones was gained by the attackers allowed them more detailed access to the users' data.

The forum needed to be offline for over a month and even as of today, not all the APTs have been completely removed from the server.

 

The forum was also under constant attack prior to that devastating take-over and the forum staff once posted it for a couple days on their Discord Server (before silently taking down that notice the next day, pretending that all was fine). This notice is from 3 months ago (September 2022

 

The worst part of it all is how "Challenger" and the other staff pretend that nothing has happened, do not even post a SINGLE UPDATE for the whole of last month even just to say that the forum would be back online very soon AND to top it all off, how the staff silently delete the DISCORD server in order to keep this whole scam under wraps.

There is absolutely no valid reason for the Board4ALL staff not to make a very quick post somewhere stating that all is well and that the forum would be back online very soon, even if they did not want to disclose the full details of the damage.

There was also absolutely no reason to delete the DISCORD server in a hurry.

 

We have yet to come to the biggest part of this scam yet: They now are planning to sell off the Board4All.biz domain for $50,000 making the forum users the scapegoats:

But to do this, they need WEB TRAFFIC to show for that domain.

So, first they let that "Error 522: Connection Timed Out" message remain for a week after taking down the server.

Then once the users started to stop visiting the Board4all.biz domain, in order to maintain traffic to the domain, they just let the forum main page show with a "Forum offline" message after the users logged in to the forum.

Then after 3 weeks of encountering that "Forum Offline" message, users started to stop visiting the forum one by one.

So now, from yesterday, to keep up the user interest, they again restored the forum from a very old forum backup from around 2-3 months ago. They will again keep taking the forum down for long intervals and keep it running with restored old backups only enough to maintain traffic to the domain so that they can get their ask price of $50K (right now the buyers are only willing to give around $33K for the domain)...

 

The bottom line is this:

The forum will keep getting restored with OLD BACKUPS again and again at regular intervals. Whatever you keep posting will keep getting deleted every time the forum is restored with the old database copies. Do not waste your time posting valuable content again and again.