Classic British Flight Sim

The AVSIM Hack: An Update

Posted: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - 0:40
The Publisher and CEO of AVSIM, Tom Allensworth, today issued the following statement; "Today, September 7th, 2009, AVSIM filed a criminal complaint with the Police Constabulary of London. We will not name any names, but have incontravertible evidence of the individual that performed the hack of AVSIM on May 12th this year. We have protected the forensic evidence and provided that evidence to the London police. We are committed to bringing justice to bear on this case.

As a result of this attempt to destroy and the subsequent rebuild of AVSIM, we have expended over $50,000 to bring AVSIM back online and that amount is still growing by the month. Numerous members of the community have contributed to the rebuilding of AVSIM, contributing over $25,000 dollars to get us back online. For that we are very, and eternally grateful. But be assured that once this action has seen its course, we fully intend to pursue this in the civil court to recoup those expenses, and as AVSIM always does, we will be putting those funds back into play, suppporting our bandwidth and system upgrade expenses.

Between the "hack" and the theft of over 60,000 email addresses from our forum system, considerable harm has been brought to AVSIM, not only to our reputation, but to our day to day operations, and at a minimum, we fully expect that the criminal complaint filed today will result in the perpatrator spending some time behind bars - under UK law. Those laws deal with unauthorized use of a computer, unauthorized and criminal theft of data, and numerous other violations of other computer and online laws violated by the acts of this person.

Finally, though we tried to resolve this over the last three months out of court, giving this person two opportunities to settle with us, the individual did not avail himself of the opportunity - in fact, he has ignored our proffers. We are now doing as we promised this person we would do; ratcheting this up to the next, criminal, level. To the extent that prudence allow, we will keep you informed of future developments."

Ben Watson wrote:50k would buy 10 fully loaded HP DL380's or 2 x HP C3000 blade enclosures with 3 servers in each and a mini SAN. Enough to run a modestly sized company.

Chris Sykes wrote:Remember thats USD, so its about £36k, which would buy you some decent servers that would cost £6-7k but not many...