This whole thing is very unsettling. We use both IE and Firefox and could not get the forums all day Tuesday and Wednesday; just got back on as of 2:30 Thursday CST. I have noticed a  few new odd things but this computer does that time to time. ( I think of the "Open the pod bay door, HAL" scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, every time I use this machine).

Here's the really odd thing. On Wed. night I asked DH to go to the library in town 10 miles away and see if he could get the forum main page. And he could! But we could not get it at home. We then ran a bunch of spyware cleaning programs but that didn't help. I don't know the difference in their system and ours, except that we have a funky dial-up connection, I'm sure theirs is better.

For what it's worth, and I do not know, the results from just-ping.com today,
Friday, April 25, 2008, at 5:37 pm PDT all now say "okay."

I couldn't access the forum or the blog, either.  I didn't see the Chinese lettering, though I never saw anything but the IE page you get when you can't access a site.

I hope nobody is criminally attacking the site.  The symptom of the Chinese lettering might just indicate that a server located there is being used in the attack.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9411
FBI busts alleged DDoS Mafia
Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2004-08-26

"A Massachusetts businessman allegedly paid members of the computer underground to launch organized, crippling distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against three of his competitors, in what federal officials are calling the first criminal case to arise from a DDoS-for-hire scheme. 

“ There are DDoS attacks all the time organized on IRC, but this is certainly the first case where you have a corporate executive who was using the services of another person to launch attacks against competitors. ”

Prosecutor Arif Alikhan Jay Echouafni, 37, is a fugitive from a five-count federal indictment in Los Angeles charging him with aiding and abetting computer intrusion and with conspiracy. As CEO of the online satellite TV retailer Orbit Communication Corp., Echouafni allegedly paid a business associate to recruit members of the computer underground to cripple three online stores, resulting in long periods of downtime and an estimated $2 million in losses to the businesses and their service providers...."

I couldn't open itchmo or itchmoforums Friday night either.  Kept getting the "IE cannot display the webpage" message.  The itchmo withdrawl is terrible and I'm concerned as to what problems there actually are.  Can Ben let us know if something is going on?

Hi Arlo, Knock on wood......nothing's wrong with my email or inbox here, that I can see.  Is yours full?

There was a DNS issue on Monday/Tuesday related to migrating servers last month.  Our DNS was still pointing to the old server so when I had them cancel the old account the DNS crapped out and the forums could not be accessed by the domain name, and all your pings and tracerts would have failed on those days.  That's been resolved now.

As for the PM issue... I don't know what's going on with that... but considering how much SMF sucks, i wouldnt' be surprised if there are some security issues.  I keep hearing complaints about e-mail addresses showing up and some days I consider just hacking up the code to remove it all together...

My posts are disappearing into cyberspace again!

I put up a post about security messages I was receiving right after JustMe's post above.  Although everything behaved normally after I posted, the post never showed up!

I had this problem one night last week, too, the night before the forum went down.

Things seem to be working OK for me now.  I also couldn't get on last night. 

Please scan for the VBS/Small.n  - I downloaded the free AVG virusscan & it caught it on my computer several days ago.  I scanned again last night & it seems to be off my computer now.  But I don't know if it sent my passwords to someone.  Here is what the worm does (I'm crossposting this to the 'something strange' thread):

http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?virusid=125728

"This worm spreads via the Internet as an attachment to infected messages. Infected messages will be sent to all email addresses harvested from the victim machine. It is 1 310 bytes in size. It is written in Visual Basic Script (VBS).

Installation
When launching, the worm creates a copy of itself in the Windows root directory:

%WinDir%\Troyan.vbs
In order to ensure that the worm is launched automatically each time Windows is restarted, the worm registers its executable file in the system registry:

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices]
        "E-Mail" = "%WinDir%\Troyan.vbs"
Payload

The worm sends itself to all contacts in the address book.

It also sends notification to the remote malicious user that the victim machine has been infected. A harvested pwl file is appended to the message. This file contains user passwords.
Propagation via email
The worm harvests email addresses from the MS Outlook address books. It then cyclically sends its body to all harvested addresses. "