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Forums - Website Topics - VGChartz got attacked [IMPORTANT]

Jumpin on 17 October 2022

I know this happened a while ago now, but I still wanted to react:

“Those motherfuckers!”



I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.

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DonFerrari on 17 October 2022
trunkswd said:

We hadn't noticed the people wrongly banned lost VG$ 2,000. We have given everyone affected the VG$ 2,000 back, plus an extra 2,000 as an apology for all the issues. 

I hope you aren't printing this money, don't want inflation on VGC.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

EpicRandy on 17 October 2022
trunkswd said:
Darwinianevolution said:

As many of you can clearly see, the front page has been vandalised with indecent stuff. The keypoints here are:

- Talon's account was compromised.
- We've contacted the Admin's.
- We've mitigated the issue slightly by removing Talon's permissions and banning him.
- The site will have to be backdated.
- Passwords may have to be reset. [IMPORTANT]
- We don't know the full extent of the damage yet.

The staff is doing everything they can right now, so for now the best course of action is to keep calm.

Edit by @trunkswd 

  • We are working on trying to restore everyone's accounts and posts that were "Deleted." Anything deleted is hidden and should not be completely removed. The team is trying to find where everything is hidden to restore it. 
  • Passwords from what I've been told should be safe, but I would change your password just in case. 
  • Anyone who had their "Supporter" removed will get it back once we get everything sorted. 

Edit by @Machina 

  • Everyone banned by the hacker has been unbanned (including my own account!), and a bug that was preventing newly unbanned people from properly viewing the website has been resolved by Bandorr. Everyone should now be able to use the site as before.
  • The posts of those who were banned are still missing; we're hoping to resolve that, but that fix is probably gonna take more time.
  • All Supporters at the time of the hack (and who had it removed), have had their Supporter status returned. The dates for expiration are a placeholder until Trucks and I have time to go over them in more detail. If I missed anyone out let me know!

Edit #2 by @Machina 

  • Restoring everyone's posts is going to be much harder than anticipated because the most recent back-ups are corrupted. Ryuu estimates there are 750,000 missing posts. We have a reliable back-up from two years ago that we're going to use to restore most (around 580,000) of those missing posts (while of course saving any currently on the site). We're still brainstorming methods to retrieve the ones posted between the date of the last good back-up and the date of the mass deletion.
  • It shouldn't be possible for this to ever happen again - the Admin tool he used to delete posts has been removed from the website entirely, and JLauro has fixed the issue that was causing the back-ups to corrupt.
  • The VG$2,000 removed from each account for being banned has been restored, plus an extra VG$2,000 has been added for the inconvenience.

As you can all see Machina has provided an update in the OP. All "deleted" posts haven't actually been deleted, but some data is missing from them such as what thread they belonged in and the user who posted them. The first step is to restore all posts from the last reliable back-up from two years ago, which will bring back about 580,000 of the 750,000 missing posts. The second step in restoring all the other posts from those affected is something we are still working to figure out. 

As Machina noted, the ability to "delete" posts has been completely removed from Admin tools, so this shouldn't happen again in the future. And JLauro has fixed the issue that caused back-ups to be corrupted. 

I somehow wish I could help, I've done this kind of work in the past and I somehow enjoy this (reconstructing data using alternative sources). But chance are techno used for data storage here fall outside of my expertise which are MS SQL, MySQL and to some degree MongoDB. 

I've been thinking the quote feature might be used to identify some of the post as they identify the thread and original poster like this one (Which identify one of Ryuu deleted post in the Ukraine thread) but since quotes are fully rendered and not just referenced by ID and they also can be partial it would require use of various complex query which would also be very resources intensive to run. Still it might manage to identify a few 1000's of the remaining ~170k post.

Also in the end if unidentified post are left, it might be a good idea to associate them all to a generic fake account in a specifically created close thread that may offer the possibility for known affected user to claim post (probably using the report feature). 

Last edited by EpicRandy - on 17 October 2022

SegaHeart on 18 October 2022

We know why he decided to pull this, on this website? What does he gain for hacking this he's still a nobody we know who want's off the website just have a inunintentional ban of those you don't like fix don't have to go that far we know who that guy dislikes.



Ryuu96 on 19 October 2022
EpicRandy said:
trunkswd said:

As you can all see Machina has provided an update in the OP. All "deleted" posts haven't actually been deleted, but some data is missing from them such as what thread they belonged in and the user who posted them. The first step is to restore all posts from the last reliable back-up from two years ago, which will bring back about 580,000 of the 750,000 missing posts. The second step in restoring all the other posts from those affected is something we are still working to figure out. 

As Machina noted, the ability to "delete" posts has been completely removed from Admin tools, so this shouldn't happen again in the future. And JLauro has fixed the issue that caused back-ups to be corrupted. 

I somehow wish I could help, I've done this kind of work in the past and I somehow enjoy this (reconstructing data using alternative sources). But chance are techno used for data storage here fall outside of my expertise which are MS SQL, MySQL and to some degree MongoDB. 

I've been thinking the quote feature might be used to identify some of the post as they identify the thread and original poster like this one (Which identify one of Ryuu deleted post in the Ukraine thread) but since quotes are fully rendered and not just referenced by ID and they also can be partial it would require use of various complex query which would also be very resources intensive to run. Still it might manage to identify a few 1000's of the remaining ~170k post.

Also in the end if unidentified post are left, it might be a good idea to associate them all to a generic fake account in a specifically created close thread that may offer the possibility for known affected user to claim post (probably using the report feature). 

I'd take all the help I can get if I was running VGChartz, Lol. What you suggested is one of our ideas though.

Plan is to rollback by 2ish years for only the users affected (40+ whom contributed about 750k+ posts) and I found out that VGC added about 170kish posts across the last 2 years but since we'd only be rolling back for certain users, it would be less than 170k left to recover. From there we don't know how to mass restore the rest yet, so the current last resort plan is to dump them into a single thread for users to claim as their own.

Just going to copy/paste what Talon said, Lol.

The goal is that Step 1 will be: Have the entire table of posts restored (from whatever the last "good" backup is dated) to a table with a completely different name. We'll then run down that table and pull over every post for the 40+ users that were affected and insert into the current table of posts.

Nothing "new" should be affected and the end result should be a gap of about 2yrs of missing posts.

It's still a lot but not 750k at least, Lol. It makes the thread method a lot more viable.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 19 October 2022

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Kakadu18 on 19 October 2022

I'm happy that you're making progress.



trunkswd on 19 October 2022

An update from JLauro: "After cleaning up some space on the main db server, I did get a backup restored last night. Is almost 2 years old, but does have 700k messages that are not live."

Ryuu estimated about 752K posts are missing, so this backup would restore all by about 52K of them (If his math is right). The other 52K posts as stated before aren't "deleted" but are hidden and are currently missing the ThreadID and UserID. We are figuring out a good way to restore the posts. 



VGChartz Sales Analyst and Writer - William D'Angelo - I stream on Twitch and have my own YouTube. Follow me on Bluesky and Threads.

I post and adjust the VGChartz hardware estimates, with help from Machina.

Writer of the Sales Comparison | Monthly Hardware Breakdown | Monthly Sales Analysis | Marketshare Features, as well as daily news on the Video Game Industry.

Chazore on 20 October 2022
Ryuu96 said:

Here's what we (the Mods) think that we know.

We have absolutely zero reason to believe it was anyone from VizionEck. We have no reason to believe it's anybody from Discord. We have a strong belief it was someone who was on the site before. If we're correct, it's a permabanned user. It's unlikely that the vast majority of you even know who he is, it's a nobody who has a grudge against certain Staff and has caused issues for us in the past.

If they have zero grudge against you guys and were perma'd, then how does a motive even start to form?, they really cannot be someone straight from /b/ on 4chan, because that treads heavily into "for teh lulz" kind of viewpoint, and getting perma'd on here and then doing it "for fun" doesn't really check out to me. 



Step right up come on in, feel the buzz in your veins, I'm like an chemical electrical right into your brain and I'm the one who killed the Radio, soon you'll all see

So pay up motherfuckers you belong to "V"

kirby007 on 21 October 2022
Chazore said:
Ryuu96 said:

Here's what we (the Mods) think that we know.

We have absolutely zero reason to believe it was anyone from VizionEck. We have no reason to believe it's anybody from Discord. We have a strong belief it was someone who was on the site before. If we're correct, it's a permabanned user. It's unlikely that the vast majority of you even know who he is, it's a nobody who has a grudge against certain Staff and has caused issues for us in the past.

If they have zero grudge against you guys and were perma'd, then how does a motive even start to form?, they really cannot be someone straight from /b/ on 4chan, because that treads heavily into "for teh lulz" kind of viewpoint, and getting perma'd on here and then doing it "for fun" doesn't really check out to me. 

Oh if you feel you have been unjustly permabanned ( which i could see happening, if you catch my drift ) i can understand wanting some payback



 "I think people should define the word crap" - Kirby007

Join the Prediction League http://www.vgchartz.com/predictions

Instead of seeking to convince others, we can be open to changing our own minds, and seek out information that contradicts our own steadfast point of view. Maybe it’ll turn out that those who disagree with you actually have a solid grasp of the facts. There’s a slight possibility that, after all, you’re the one who’s wrong.

Ryuu96 on 21 October 2022
Chazore said:
Ryuu96 said:

Here's what we (the Mods) think that we know.

We have absolutely zero reason to believe it was anyone from VizionEck. We have no reason to believe it's anybody from Discord. We have a strong belief it was someone who was on the site before. If we're correct, it's a permabanned user. It's unlikely that the vast majority of you even know who he is, it's a nobody who has a grudge against certain Staff and has caused issues for us in the past.

If they have zero grudge against you guys and were perma'd, then how does a motive even start to form?, they really cannot be someone straight from /b/ on 4chan, because that treads heavily into "for teh lulz" kind of viewpoint, and getting perma'd on here and then doing it "for fun" doesn't really check out to me. 

They have a grudge against certain Staff. It's really a nobody, Lol. If we're right on who it is then the majority of you won't even know him, he was permabanned years ago and barely had much posting, he's just upset he was banned and been a persistent annoyance to us for years. Do we need to give him any more attention? He clearly wants it. I don't know if there is any use in us saying who it is.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 21 October 2022