Sandy,

According to this news story,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/21/santy_worm/
there is a bot about that defaces phpBB scripted boards, so you may have to upgrade to version 2.0.11 if you can.

Regardless of whether that is possible, I do hope you keep regular backups.

I just found out about this about a half hour ago. For the time being, I have performed the temporary fix which avoids this problem. I couldn't perform the 2.0.11 update since I have customized a bunch of PHPBB 2.0.6 scripts myself, and only have a record of what I changed on my work computer. I'm on vacation right now, but will be popping into work in a few days. Maybe I'll do it then.

FYI, as my host struggles with issues as a result of this worm, the site may be offline from time to time... as it was about a half hour ago, which is what caused me to look into what was going on...!

It's pretty nasty to release out a brand new exploit worm like this just before Christmas when everyone is on vacation!

Thanks for the info, Jaap.

Sandy

Sandy,

I know nothing about this subject but I just came accross the following. Perhaps it has some info for you

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Security-Mistakes/

Only the forum on this site is in PHP, and is being written by far better programmers than me, so I presume they are on top of this stuff... in spite of the recently discovered flaw! The rest of the site is written by me, but is in Perl.

However, I am in the process of writing a huge site for a friend entirely in PHP (my first PHP project), so I'll definitely give this document a careful read through. Thanks for the tip.

Sandy