crackertracker pro

[Stevenh]

I have been looking to reduce the chances of being hacked or flooded. I was wondering if anyone has tried crackertracker and if so, how is it? Should I use phpbb security rather than this addon? And didn't I see phpbb securities website brought down by hacking attacks?

Any help appreciated
Thanks
Steven

[ZacFields]

Use PHPBB Security...I would definitely be the person to ask about that too.

I was running IM 1.3.2d without phpbb security and all of a sudden about 2 months ago my boards started to slow down a lot. It was ridiculous.

I wasn't aware of the DDos attacks and all the other things people can do to your forums whether you're fully upgraded or not. So I purchased a virtual server running PHP5. As I've said many times over, I couldn't move my site because IM is not compatible with PHP5 yet.

At this point my site was shutting itself down every hour because it was exceeding the hourly query limit on my shared host.

I finally upgraded to IM 1.4.0 and then from there I upgraded to PHPBB 2.0.20. This was about 3 weeks ago I think and PHPBB Security has caught and banned 5 DDos attempts and 1 Sanity Mix Worm attempt. I run a local site located in Iowa and all the banned IP's were traced to washinton DC and the sanity mix work was traced to China, so it's easy to tell that it was not a mistake that they were banned.

Ever since I upgraded completely, my site has run perfectly fine and we have not had any problems. Once your forums have been around 3+ years as mine have, you start to get established on the search engines and hackers/poser kiddies can find your site easier.

Also you should alter your footer PHPBB information so that people can't find your site by searching "powered by phpbb"

Zac