Traumatic scenes for car geeks as forum falls over
Man made cake, spoke to wife
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There were fears of further outbreaks of violence on the streets yesterday when the UK's busiest motoring forum site, PistonHeads.com, disappeared offline.
Desperate car geeks were forced to work, make a Victoria sponge and even talk to the wives, or so they claimed once the forum was back up and running.
The Reg was contacted by a worried reader, and PistonHeads fan, who had seen a posting on a hackers' forum claiming to have pinched the site's user database.
But an insider at the site assured us customer data was safe, although techies were still going through the final lines of the logs.
Our source explained the site had been contacted by a "white hat" – a hacker who offered to share vulnerabilities in exchange for a small fee. The two co-operated to close holes.
He said: "We've learnt the hard way to be honest with people. We have a very technical readership and the site was started by an IT consultant who drove a TVR – back when all IT consultants drove TVRs."
It is believed the post in the hackers' forum was put up by an associate of the white hat hacker and was subsequently removed.
Our source said final checks were being made but that the site was 99 per cent sure that nothing sensitive had gone: the downing of the site was treated as a possible hack only as a precaution.
The site's transactions are dealt with by WorldPay, so no card details are stored. All passwords for the forum are encrypted and the site collects limited other information about forum posters.
The site is back up and running now, although some users are complaining it is slower than usual.
PistonHeads is here, and the thread explaining the downtime is here. ®
COMMENTS
".... back when all IT consultants drove TVRs."
I remember it well.
This was during the brief period between IT consultants becoming able to easily afford TVRs and it becoming generally known among IT consultants what a terribly unreliable stonking POS they really were, at which point they all bought Porsches instead.
A mate went to test drive one. On pulling away from a set of lights, the salesman disappeared into the back of the car as the bolts securing the passenger seat to the floor had not been fitted by the factory. The salesman suggested that he buy from their stock of recent model used cars as; "some other poor bastard will have sorted out all the problems for you".
My mate's boss also had one at the time. He was quite keen on it 'til one day the entire dashboard assembly dropped into his lap. Investigation by the dealer showed that it was mostly held on with well-chewed wine gums rather than the more usual screws.......
Well...
...you could always drive like a complete self important c*** and then at least you'll feel like you own one.
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