Feed and MP3s hacked?

[Version3]

Well it would seem so. Someone seems to have used an exploit (or something) to gain some level of control over our dedicated server that houses www.switchedonshow.com, and they added a clip into the middle of one of our shows at the end of the week. Our feed was also modified to show only the name of the group for he description of the show they messed with, and it went out to some of our subscribers. Although it looked like someone gained access again later, changing all of the passwords and doing a few updates to the OS and Apache seems to have kept anyone else out of it. We've been hit today with an attempted DOS attack.

Anyone else getting harassed? I would think someone was just trolling for servers or mad at us, but they didn't take down our site, they only inserted a clip into our MP3 file and named themselves claiming responsibility. I don't want to give out their name yet, because I don't think they deserve the publicity.

Has anything like this happened to anyone else? If so, did it happen more than once?

Thanks in advance.

[NateandDi]

Whooaa, sounds messy, man.

What kind of viscious bastard would attack switched:on?


We would put put up the defense shields now!

[FrankJKimeJR]

Excluding those with a lack of business plan, dot-com era companies failed due to lack of scalability. The only obvious solution for independent podcasters is a pier-to-pier distribution. With motivation of spamming advertisement we are facing corruption of any node in the file sharing network where advertisements are inserted as files share. Demonstration of this corruption is the music industry who would seed copyrighted music files with empty or corrupted music as an effort to combat infringement.

What is needed is an authentication system, similar in nature to digital signature/ crc/ checksum for validating integrity of each individual file. Signature keys could be added to the RSS feed which would give a low bandwidth emission from the show owner’s website for each file. This could be another tag added to the enclosure. Without some effort now, many of the most popular independent (thus unfunded) shows with most merit will be the first to fail under their own cost of supporting bandwidth.

After we figure out the bandwidth problem a micro-payment system would be nice!

[dcolanduno]

Has anything like this happened to anyone else? If so, did it happen more than once?

Thanks in advance.

Not 'like' that, but I have noticed some interesting stuff going on in the past few days that would be 'like' that.

Organized groups of people writing e-mails to try to get some site admins to remove certain shows.

A couple attempts to hack our phpBB board, and put on messages about going to listen to other shows, and putting up huge useless posts about how ours and other shows suck. "Obviously a form note".

Stuff like that... podcasting has officially become popular. The weenie crowd is now in our back yard... thinking they are all 'leet' and stuff just because they know how to download some scripts. :)

[Version3]

We were attacked a second time. It might have been via another domain on the server, but there was a lot of action that took our forums offline for a while, and eventually maxed out the drive space on our machine. Totally messed things up for a bit, but we are still putting out new shows... so if you have a download that failed, give it a try again. :)