Exploit in forum revealed and fixed.

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[City Builder]

After the past couple months of peoples avatars disappearing, and all that I tried to fix it, I finally had to break down and contact the developers of the forum software for help.

Apparently there was an exploit discovered in the forum software that has now been patched out so that it can't happen again.  However, about 300+ files were infected but have since been cleaned.  I have removed all files that were suggested by the cleaner that might contain exploit code, as well as (literally) over 12,000 files that were created in just a couple days in some obscure directory on our server where we would never think to look had it not been for this avatar disapearance magic act.

Let me stress that there is no danger of catching anything from this exploit of the forum software, it can and could only infect the files that run the forum software and nothing else.

However, I am still going through all the attachements to ensure that they scan clean and ask that you don't "download" any attachments to messages until I post my findings.  Clicking on screenshot thumbnails to view a larger version of the screenshot is perfectly safe.  Just do not download any message attachments that are .exe .zip .ace, or any other compression file.

As far as has been reported this exploit only attacked the files that run the forum itself and out of the hundreds of thousands of users that run this forum package, no other files have been affected, and with the exploit that was used, it couldn't do any harm to your computer if it did as all the exploit did was to write an extra header to those files that run the forum that basically injected some code that is only exploitable on the Operating system that our forums run on (which is NOT a windows based server).

I will let you know when I have scanned any archive files that are stored on our server but even after I do, I still suggest now as I have always suggested that you scan any file that you download from our site or any site on the internet.

The forum has been updated with the latest updates now and we may have lost some custom functionality in the process, but this is the price I pay to have custom mods and then have to update the forum software, all the mods have to be rewritten to make them usable again with newer forum software.  Well, some of them do anyway.

I'll keep in touch.

[City Builder]

Ok, there was only 695 files to download and having my anti virus scanner scan them only takes about 10 seconds.  Im happy to announce all attachements that I have downloaded and scanned were clean of any malicious code.

Never the less, I still suggest scanning any file you download regardless if it comes from this website, or email, or any other website on the net.  Better safe than sorry.