Forum might be hacked. Please read & help!

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:31 am

Hi everyone,

I and a couple of friends run a website and forum and from this morning we can't get into the forum using out regular url. http://forum.ourdomainname.com .
It gets redirected to an advertising site.

We can still get into the forum using the url like this http://ourdomainname/forum. But then we can't get into administration panel. it gives a 404 page of our server host.

Everything in cpanel seems to be fine.

We think we might have been hacked but don't know how to solve it.

We're running 2.0 but not the last update because we were still figuring out if that would work with the MODs we've installed. (We are quite new to running a website)

Any help would be much appreciated.
Let me know if you need more info, I've tried to be as clear as possible.

Thank,
MM

RMcGirr83 · Post by **RMcGirr83** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:44 am

If you post a link to your forum, that would probably help a lot.

Post by **stevemaury** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:45 am

404 means files aren't there. It will be difficult to help you unless you give the real URL of your board.

Post by **Brf** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:50 am

That 404 is because the cookie domain is forum.website and script path is "/", so redirects starting from /forum/ go to the wrong place.

Probably, someone has placed a index.html file in your forum's directory, or an htaccess redirect somewhere.

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:06 pm

the link to the forum is

http://forum.benellisfansite.com

or the one that still works

http://benellisfansite.com/forum

Probably, someone has placed a index.html file in your forum's directory, or an htaccess redirect somewhere.

Do you mean in cpanel? What do I do about it?

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:16 pm

I've found a file called .htacces in my forum directory.

If I click on the url of it http://www.benellisfansite.com/forum/.htaccess I get a 404 page.

Could that be it? Or is this normal. And yes the filename start with a dot.

Post by **Brf** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:21 pm

YOu cannot browse to an htaccess file.
Use your cpanel file explorer and see what is in it.

momentum · Post by **momentum** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:22 pm

The .htaccess is a file for Apache (the web server) to read only. It won't allow you to read it from outside. It's usually used to limit access to the directory it's stored in.

As for your sub-domain, (forum.benellisfansite.com) check in your cPanel under subdomains and see where the sub-domain redirects. It should be setup to point to http://benellisfansite.com/forum

Craig.

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:31 pm

momentum wrote:The .htaccess is a file for Apache (the web server) to read only. It won't allow you to read it from outside. It's usually used to limit access to the directory it's stored in.

As for your sub-domain, (forum.benellisfansite.com) check in your cPanel under subdomains and see where the sub-domain redirects. It should be setup to point to http://benellisfansite.com/forum

Craig.

Do you mean subdomains stats?

That doesn't say http://benellisfansite.com/forum or forum.benellisfansite.com

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:35 pm

the htacces file says just

DirectoryIndex index.php

momentum · Post by **momentum** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:09 pm

Forget the .htaccess file. It's fine and doing it's job.

Go back to your cPanel and open the Subdomains section. See what settings are in there.

If you can't find anything relating to subdomains then that's probably why the forum.benellisfansite.com URL no longer works. forum.benellisfansite.com is a sub-domain so without anything to define it, it simply doesn't exist.

Craig.

M Macaroni · Post by **M Macaroni** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:19 pm

thank you for all your help, problem is sorted for now. Yes for some reason the forum no longer appeared as a subdomain in cpanel, adding it back has sorted it, at least temporarily.

I can't find any obvious redirects in the files, although 2 files look "odd" - extension.inc and common.php but as the version is so old I'm not sure how I could restore original versions and would prefer to avoid a full backup restore and will probably upgrade to phpBB3

ric323 · Post by **ric323** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:42 pm

M Macaroni wrote:I can't find any obvious redirects in the files, although 2 files look "odd" - extension.inc and common.php but as the version is so old I'm not sure how I could restore original versions and would prefer to avoid a full backup restore and will probably upgrade to phpBB3

What do you mean "odd". They are standard phpBB files.

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