resolved Has the site become corrupted ?

[Guest]

Warning ! Site admin.

The site has become corrupted , how did i receive this in my private email and why has my private email stopped working this morning? I have never posted on this forum or any other and do not take part in social media as i have a life. You have a major problem if members details are being accessed in this manner. I am cancelling my membership as i don't trust your security anymore. Will also forward to qld police. I suspect you have a COWARD using the forum to hurt an ex? or just a total loser. I have not opened the photos but i think i can guess the content. 

RaskM has sent you a message.eml

[ellicat]

 

Admin is dealing with this spam attack.

Thanks for posting.

 

[Volvo]

Yep got the same spam mail !!..

[Guest]

Once this **** starts happening it is time to leave, who knows how our information has been used or sold. I thought this sort of carry on was  for political staffers. Never experienced anything like this before, my only experience of web forums has been AFO, ausfish and when nugget downie had his forum. Dave's is gone ,ausfish is dead and now this carry on, no more internet forums for me Goodbye and all the best in dealing with the coward.

cloff

[Kat]

1 minute ago, cloff said:

Once this **** starts happening it is time to leave, who knows how our information has been used or sold. I thought this sort of carry on was  for political staffers. Never experienced anything like this before, my only experience of web forums has been AFO, ausfish and when nugget downie had his forum. Dave's is gone ,ausfish is dead and now this carry on, no more internet forums for me Goodbye and all the best in dealing with the coward.

cloff

Hey @cloff yes obviously there is something going on but I don't think you should be so quick to blame AFO.  It is just a fact of life, whatever rules are in place someone will find a way to break them online or not.  Governments get hacked so the only way to stay completely safe is to chuck out all your devices.

Cheers Kat

[GazzaP]

Yeah,lets talk fishing,not F...ing.Also getting e-mails from,Umm,NOT fishos shall we say.

[AFO]

Hi All,

The site has not become corrupted and no details have been breached.

What has happened is that a member signed up and then sent multiple PM messages to quite a few members. This member has since been banned.

If you received an email, that was because you had notifications set to ON to email you when you receive a personal message on AFO. The banned member did not have access to your email address or other details, the email was generated by AFO because of your notification settings.

 

In response, we have made some changes to AFO to restrict new members (<30 days) to only be able to post posts and topics to 10 a day and also all members to only be able to send 15 PM's a day and this is restricted to 5 recipients to each PM. 

As well as this, we have restricted further IP's and also blocked more problematic (spamming) countries from accessing AFO.

We can adjust these limits down the track if members feel they are too restrictive, but for the time being we are clamping down so that members aren't spammed and everyone can enjoy AFO without these issues.

[AFO]

One of the features of AFO is the ability of members to message each other. Generally there are no issues with this and it is a good way for members to interact outside of the public forum. However, the PM system does have the potential to be abused by a member (before they are swiftly banned) and so please report any spam messages through the reporting feature and we will ban them. Thanks

[AFO]

AFO has also increased our spam protection and also implemented further automatic content moderation of new members so that going forward there is less ability for spammers to post so hopefully this combats this so that it doesn't happen again. If there is a spam message, please click the Report function and it will ensure the spam and the offending members is dealt with.

[AFO]

Please also note that as we remove these two offending members it will also remove their content and the spam personal messages from your inbox (although it might take a day or two). Apologies all for the inconvenience from these two members.

[Kenne]

I also received an E-mail   Deleted it.

[Drop Bear]

Thanks AFO,

I appreciate your work and your response. 

[Angry51]

It's not fair.

How come I didn't get a dirty email.

I might report this to Admin.

[Brodie_S]

3 hours ago, cloff said:

Once this **** starts happening it is time to leave, who knows how our information has been used or sold. I thought this sort of carry on was  for political staffers. Never experienced anything like this before, my only experience of web forums has been AFO, ausfish and when nugget downie had his forum. Dave's is gone ,ausfish is dead and now this carry on, no more internet forums for me Goodbye and all the best in dealing with the coward.

cloff

If you’re scared of your information being sold or used don’t use or buy a phone period you can’t have %100 privacy when using a mobile phone mobile phone company’s require use of your personal data to do many things . Phones track you’re location foot steps and a lot more information a Common example of this is your phones microphone being used to help recommend adds for you if you say a random product randomly then go on your phone this product is likely going to be targeted to you in ads .on top of that apps and services use even more data to recommend ads and recommend news feed for apps like face book and Instagram although Instagram and Facebook take it a step further and sell you’re information to certain companies for profit . Everything you do on your phone has a digital footprint doesn’t matter if you delete history or clear data its still been recorded somewhere in your phone it’s just harder to access. Your phone also knows where you live where you work and then you’re asleep and so much more if your worried about your data being used or sold when using the internet I would recommend you download TOR onion browser as with tor it’s anonymous and leaves no digital footprint so it’s a lot harder to have your information collected 

[AFO]

As mentioned, there is no privacy issue here to any members. All that happened was that a member spammed through Private Messages on AFO. No personal information, email addresses or data etc was accessed, it was just a one way communication from the spammer to other members on the AFO website. Any emails sent were just notifications from AFO to alert members they had a new message on AFO to read.

Measures have now been put in place to stop this from happening again. Thanks everyone for your understanding.

[Drop Bear]

1 hour ago, Angry51 said:

It's not fair.

How come I didn't get a dirty email.

I might report this to Admin.

haha that was my reaction too haha. 

[AFO]

We believe all spam messages should now be deleted from your inboxes.

Also all content from the banned members should also have been removed.

 

Please let us know if you still have a spam PM in your inbox or have any other concerns. Cheers 

[Old Scaley]

Well I got a date on Friday night out of it, so it ain’t all bad.

@Breaming with bro and anyone else with time on their hands, if you want to know more about how ads seem to pop up after you talk about stuff, listen to a podcast by Reply All called “Is Facebook spying on you”. It is a few years old now but very illuminating and just a little scary. Jury was out on the actual use of microphones though. It doesn’t pay to be too paranoid but good to always to Be careful online.

Thanks @AFO for the great job you do in keeping the site running smoothly.

[rayke1938]

I am 82 and thought my luck had changed.

Edited March 24, 2021 by rayke1938

[AUS-BNE-FISHO]

7 hours ago, Guest said:

Warning ! Site admin.

The site has become corrupted , how did i receive this in my private email and why has my private email stopped working this morning? I have never posted on this forum or any other and do not take part in social media as i have a life. You have a major problem if members details are being accessed in this manner. I am cancelling my membership as i don't trust your security anymore. Will also forward to qld police. I suspect you have a COWARD using the forum to hurt an ex? or just a total loser. I have not opened the photos but i think i can guess the content. 

RaskM has sent you a message.eml 19.51 kB · 3 downloads

Hey mate

Don’t get your knickers in a knot too much.

Like it’s all been stated above, it’s a scammer - we get lots of them. Thank you @AFO for fixing up this whole issue. Shame you had to leave the forum because of this issue but most of your online data can be accessed easily by scammers, etc. Also, there’s not really any need to pass this to the police. All the best anyways.

Regards Hamish

 

[dmck]

Does this all mean she is NOT calling to see me this weekend......

[ellicat]

40 minutes ago, dmck said:

Does this all mean she is NOT calling to see me this weekend......

I think you may have lucked out as there is a good chance it is a man.

[Angry51]

30 minutes ago, ellicat said:

 

Wrong post, sorry.

[benno573]

10 hours ago, AFO said:

In response, we have made some changes to AFO to restrict new members (<30 days) to only be able to post posts and topics to 10 a day and also all members to only be able to send 15 PM's a day and this is restricted to 5 recipients to each PM. 

Can we please also place a restriction on @GregOug posting when under the influence of more than one red wine?

i didn’t get an email but looking forward to the reports from @Old Scaley and @rayke1938 after their experiences. Unless they don’t want to talk about it after...

[Do$tylz]

There's a general lack of public understanding of technology, the internet, how everything works and the art of the possible.

Internet and data privacy is a HUGE issue that I would say 99% of people don't understand how it works or what impact it could have on your life.

Even BoB's message is missing a lot more info - your phone 100% can pass on lots of information, but it all comes down to how you configure things and it stretches beyond your phone, the telco's and what apps you have installed. Ever wondered why there is "free internet" at shopping centres? Your digital footprint can be amassed by the large tech companies (or even small companies leveraging their capabilities) as you use or come across their products (facebook "like" button on a website tracks you).

If you want to read into what data about you IS being collected, have a look at the fed governments data collection laws and usage over the last 6 years.

I can tell you - from an AFO perspective - there is a very small team of people who mod and an even smaller admin team. There is no profit being made off AFO - just enough advertising space to cover costs to host our community.... of which at times is actually not even enough.

 

edit - someone knowing what your email address is, is the least of your problems. It's kinda like knowing someones house address - but not knowing the name of the person that lives there or who owns it. The information is useless without context - the thing to ask yourself is - how much context can you get from the information publicly available or handed over?

[GregOug]

19 hours ago, benno573 said:

Can we please also place a restriction on @GregOug posting when under the influence of more than one red wine?

i didn’t get an email but looking forward to the reports from @Old Scaley and @rayke1938 after their experiences. Unless they don’t want to talk about it after...

when under the influence of more than one red wine! I’ll never be able to post now!