Last night the following statement was released by Tom Allensworth of Avsim, our primary hosting source for add-ons:
During the early evening yesterday, we noticed that some alarming things were starting to happen on our servers. The first sign of an issue was that some functionality disappeared on our web server. That progressed to not being able to access the web server via FTP or SSH. Finally, the web/forum server tripped offline. Next the library/email server started to exhibit issues. We went in to reboot it, and that is when it failed entirely. The partitions on both of the servers had been removed. We shut down both servers until we can get a technical member up to our Network Operations Center (NOC), and do a comprehensive inspection of the damage....
Early in the evening, I sent out a bulk email to all forum members letting them know that we anticipate shutting down the Web/Forum server for a period of time. About a third of the way through the process of sending that email to all 60,000 forum members, the hacker succeeded in bringing the server down. The email was did not get sent to everyone. The reason I sent the email, based on what we knew at that time, was because that a minimum, we would need to shut the web/forum server down to inspect the unit and do repairs. At the time the email was sent, we were unaware that a hack was in progress and that our system would be taken offline entirely. There were no hoaxes involved, as some have asserted.
We have not yet decided on a plan on how to again make recommended add-ons easily accessible to our members. In the meantime, we can recommend visiting FlightSim.com, the other major FS site online. We apologize for the inconvenience to you and wish the best for Avsim's recovery.
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