Security issue from old TUGBBS?

The Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) software we were using back then was considered state of the art when we switched over to it (from a crude home brew setup by Laurence Chan). Not sure when this took place, but I THINK it may have been December 2000 based on user registration dates of some folks (like myself) that I know were around then. The world wasn't so concerned about online security back then as the bad guys were just getting started.

But as the years went by Laurence moved on, leaving us with nobody knowledgeable enough to install updates and still carry our modifications over to the new version. As the online world advanced, our version of UBB became more and more antiquated to the point that its publisher would no longer support it. We moved to vBulletin in June 2005.

Nice history lesson. Since the information the OP seems concerned about seems to pretty much be part of the 'public domain' now and available to a Google search and probably many other avenues, the only defense would be to abandon one's ISP, and email addresses and start fresh. From Doug's description, that's basically what TUG did when the old software became unusable.

We often don't realize what a different digital world we live in now compared to 20 years ago. And in another 20 years???

Jim

I suspect the security hole occurred after TUG moved over to the vbulletin software and the old site was abandoned. There is no longer any security measures in place with the old software which now readily displays ips and emails. I hope the same thing does't occur with v bulletin down the track.
Any internet security experts out there? Is there anyone who can access the old bbs as admin to delete my email and real name in my user profile? Anyone at all?
It actually lets me log in but not make any changes.

as mentioned (numerous) times before, that version of hte forums hasnt changed in 10+ years...its existed in its exact same format from then..until now....its not like something happened last week that suddenly made that info visible.

Ill also repeat, that if we had the ability to delete your info, we would. I am not sure how to answer the same question you keep asking any better than that =)

Sydney said:

I suspect the security hole occurred after TUG moved over to the vbulletin software and the old site was abandoned. There is no longer any security measures in place with the old software which now readily displays ips and emails. I hope the same thing does't occur with v bulletin down the track.
Any internet security experts out there? Is there anyone who can access the old bbs as admin to delete my email and real name in my user profile? Anyone at all?
It actually lets me log in but not make any changes.

Click to expand...

Yes, I have been somewhat surprised that I could still log in and do that, and I did remove your email address and real name from your old profile. But I don't think it is the information in the profiles that is being retrieved by Google, it is the old threads themselves, and they had the names and email addresses hardcoded in. I have no way to remove personal information from those as they are static files that were only updated when messages were added, removed, or edited, so they are "frozen" as they were when the old board was shut down.

And there never were any security measures of that sort in place with UBB -- that was one of many reasons we moved to vBulletin which keeps all personal information in a database not accessible by the search engines.

Sydney said:

I suspect the security hole occurred after TUG moved over to the vbulletin software and the old site was abandoned. There is no longer any security measures in place with the old software which now readily displays ips and emails. I hope the same thing does't occur with v bulletin down the track.
Any internet security experts out there? Is there anyone who can access the old bbs as admin to delete my email and real name in my user profile? Anyone at all?
It actually lets me log in but not make any changes.

Click to expand...

Odd, Sydney shows as GuestGuest under their TUG handle. Also the post count shows 'n/a'. The user also does not show up in the list of current BBS users? Where did Sydney go?

dioxide45 said:

Odd, Sydney shows as GuestGuest under their TUG handle. Also the post count shows 'n/a'. The user also does not show up in the list of current BBS users? Where did Sydney go?

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This individual's TUGBBS account was deleted at her request.