For those that like to play on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS): its down due to hacker activity. FICS didn’t specify what type of hacking it was subject to.
Although its hardly unexpected, since anything on the internet can be the victim of a hacker attack. I can only surmise that that its either some bored hacker, or a player (that apparently moonlights as a hacker), had a grip with FICS. /shrug.
Lets hope FICS rebounds quickly, and that the damages are minimal.
Sad. I logged in for the first time in a long time last week and played a nightly 5 0. Here’s hoping it will be back up soon.
I can think of a couple of other potential reasons: Practice for exploiting other systems with a similar configuration, attempts to obtain username/password combos for other systems (many people use the same combination on multiple sites that may be of more value,) or simply trying to exploit by IP address (the penetrator doesn’t know nor care what the IP is until they’ve breached it.) It also may be a denial of service attack (as opposed to an actual system penetration.)
While the bored-script-kiddie still does exist, my impression is that most cracking these days are organized and focused efforts by people being paid to do it.
There’s an ocean of hackers out there that are not paid professionals, yet well beyond kiddie scripting.
Kind of like the quote in the movie “Hackers”. Ramόn Sánchez, saying to Dade Murphy: “You need help with your 'puter?”
Of course Dade Murphy (played by John Lee Miller), was a hacker.
That’s not to say script kiddies can’t do some serious damage. Years ago, when Amazon, and other high end websites got taken down by a DOS attack, it was done by a Canadian teenager basically running *scripts he downloaded off the internet… not realizing just how much damage he’d be sowing.
*If I recall, it was specifically a program he downloaded that automated scripting, so he didn’t even know how to program a script. He just plugged in the parameters he wanted into the program, and it spit out working scripts.
True, but the unaffiliated hacker is definitely a minority these days. Organized crime and nation states account for the vast majority of known breaches these days, according to Verizon. Unknown/hacktivist/unaffiliated actors are a minority. When Hackers came out, this was definitely not the case.
(Not to say that this work was one way or the other… Just that there are plausible reasons why it might not be an unaffiliated attack.)
At work I get multiple intrusion attempts every day from out of country IPs. Ain’t no reason they should be attempting penetration that I’ve been able to discover, just random IP address sniffing and attempts when they discover a particular port we’ve got intentionally open (right up to when that IP is auto-banned.)
I also note that the graphics are now missing when I load the FICS home page in my browser. Other subpages (Sponsors at least) they’re still up. Must be pretty bad, and I hope that the penetration source is discovered fixed and there’s some kind of recovery that can be done.
Note that there is a temporary copy of FICS now up and running. The server address is fics2.freechess.org on Port 23. Existing usernames/passwords do work.
It is temporary only - no history will be ported back to the main site. News 1506 on the temporary site is as follows:
Thanks to FICS Team Legue (teamleague.org) pointing to the FICS Games archive (ficsgames.org) with the news.
Please don’t hack the forums at chesshere.com Merci
I had never heard of it so read through their forums a bit. Took me a while to get the joke b/c the staff posts are strange and obsessive.
Their PR Director needs to find a new line of work.
The main FICS website has been up and down, but this evening an update was posted in two more news items on the temporary server (see above.)
Speaking of forums-feel free to nuke the ones at chesscircle.net at your earliest convenience. Thank you :mrgreen:
And it looks like FICS is back up again on the main server. Yay!
Looks like they’re down again.
Back up now. 
Down again.
is the main website down?
I recall an anecdote (perhaps fictitious) where a couple of guys got into a flame war. One boasted, “I’m going to bring you down. What is your IP address?” And the other said, “127.0.0.1” Never heard back from him after that.
The website seems down but the server is responding through BabasChess.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like it. 