Accidental Delete

[ibaker]

I am not sure what happened but I was working on my site when suddenly everything went haywire.

I suddenly found that my first category along with the 9 forums in that category all went missing. I looked in the ACP and the category and forums were not listed in the Node Tree.

I opened the db and also the tables of Forums and Nodes were also missing the category and forums.

I checked the threads and posts tables and the threads and posts that were in those forums were still in the db so my assumption was that somehow the Category got deleted thus also deleting the 9 forums that were contained in that category.

The following is what I have done to fix it but I need assistance from others by way of confirming that I have done all I can:

1. Immediately closed the site and turned off ALL the crons
2. Opened the daily backup that I did last night and exported the "Forums" and "Nodes" tables
3. Opened the live site db and truncated the "Forums" and "Nodes" tables
4. Imported the "Forums" and "Nodes" exports that I did from the backup into the live db
5. Went to the ACP, opened and saved a Usergroup Permissions (just to ensure permissions were reset)
6. Rebuilt all the caches
7. Checked the site all "seems" ok
8. Turned all the crons back on

Please, is there anything else that I need to do in your opinion...thanks

 

[Jake Bunce]

That looks correct. You should probably rebuild the forum info for good measure:

Admin CP -> Tools -> Rebuild Caches -> Rebuild Forum Information

 

[ibaker]

Thanks Jake, yes I did that when I did all the caches...back in the day (being the new buzz line these days) I use to be very heavy in RDMS so I am not sure if there is anything "clever" done with XF in what is stored where in the db that may trip me up...thanks again

 

[Chris D]

Glad this is sorted.

I'm slightly concerned though that it happened in the first place. Do you have any idea at all how it might have happened?

I have recently seen a couple of boards get compromised, most likely thanks to the bug that was in swfupload (not a XenForo bug, but they released a fix fairly quickly). Of course the weak link in the chain here as far as I can tell was that people hadn't updated to 1.1.3 nor had they even applied the single file swfupload fix.

Hopefully you've upgraded to 1.1.3 or at the very least applied the fix?

 

[ibaker]

Thanks Chris...yes it is 1.1.3...I am guessing it happened when using the function in Waindigo Social Groups addon:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/social-groups-by-waindigo.891/
where you can import the records from the other Groups mod.

It worked ok, with a couple of errors that I overcome, in my xampps development environment so after I checked that all was working ok there, I then did it on my live site...that's when it hit the proverbial fan

 

[Chris D]

Ok, that's good to know.

As long as we have some sort of explanation - wouldn't want you to have to go through this again... I bet yesterday wasn't fun

 

[estranged]

Recently a few random threads disappeared from my forum. I checked the mod/admin logs. They have not been deleted. I've been thinking about this lately. What could have happened?

 

[ibaker]

One thing I found I forgot to do, and posted here just in case it is of help to anyone else, is to reset the the Prefixes to the forums that went missing...this just highlights other little things that may need to be checked if you ever find yourself in a similar situation...and I hope you don't, I aged 10 years from it, there were 138,000 posts in those forums

 

[Claudio]

Today I had same situation with a customer...I took the same steps as you and everything works fine.

By the way.. he is using last Xenforo version and the forum was hacked only in this way...the hacker deleted nodes and wrote a message on the board.