Despite conforming to the requests in a couple of versions of this message, I still appear to get it every day at first logon. Becoming rather tedious.
One step forward two steps back !!!
Hello El Grifo!
This is a special announcement from PPRuNe Forums Admin. Further to our previous message about keeping your email address up to date and your password secure, we have found the cause of the repeated hack attempts into members accounts is a script (HackBot) that has been written with malicious and nuisance intent. As members profiles do not contain any information that should be of any value to hackers and studying the way the hack attempts have been carried out, it has been determined that the HackBot is intended as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
As the computer running the HackBot is using an AOL IP address, after it has randomly tried to access an account, the account is locked out and the IP address blocked for 15 minutes. If another AOL user with the same IP address tries to log-in within the 15 minutes of lock-out, they will get the locked out message too.
In order to stifle the HackBot, we have had to block the IP address being used which has caused more inconvenience to some AOL users. For this we apologise but it is the only way we can prevent the HackBot from running. We have also introduced a 'Captcha' image code section to the log-in which is designed to make sure that it is a human rather than a Bot trying to access PPRuNe. The Captcha image code is turned on and off randomly and you may or may not encounter it.
Overall, the recent attack has not breached our security and is intended only to be a nuisance to the Admin of the site and to our members. It has only partially succeeded and the appropriate authorities have been notified.
Once again, we apologise for any inconvenience that may have been caused by the extra security we have had to implement. Please click here to contact us for if you need any assistance.