Please expect occasional email outages

[BoardAdmin]

Unfortunately we have been under attack from so many hackers the past few weeks that I have been forced to shut down a number of vulnerable services while they are not in use (FTP, for example, which is only used for administrative functions).

As their traditional vulnerable services have been taken away from them the hackers have devoted more time and resources to trying to break in to our email system through "Brute Force" or "Dictionary" attacks (they just try to log in with every imaginable user name and password combination).

Although we take measures to block the IP addresses the hackers use they come back with new addresses. Hence, we have even had to shut down the email services from time to time. This means your NEW POST notifications and PRIVATE MESSAGE notices may be delayed or lost.

We are hoping that whatever is behind this latest series of hack attempts dies down soon. The SF-Fandom server is not being singled out for special attention so far as we know. This is all automated hacking that requires little to no human supervision. Once a server has been compromised the software notifies the hackers and then they begin to exploit vulnerabilities.

[Michael]

So now that the attacks on the server have died down I have not had to disable the email services very much at all. We can disregard this warning for now.