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Model Ship World attacked by hackers

P

polydoc

Joined
Mar 9, 2020
Messages
377
Points
278

Location
Washington Crossing, PA
For those of you who haven't seen this, here is a post from the NRG regarding Model Ship World:
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MODEL SHIP WORLD DOWN
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Dear Members,

Re: Model Ship World.

In the last three days, there has been a global issue regarding the software that operates computer servers. This has impacted websites and servers around the world. An unscrupulous group of hackers had found a way around server security and had broken into many servers, destroying data.

Unfortunately for us, Model Ship World’s server was one of countless to be affected.

Over the last 36hrs, our host had taken our server offline to apply software patches which would secure our server, but by the time they did this, it was too late.

The attackers not only deleted the files from our primary disc, housing MSW, but also deleted the three backups we had on a secondary, separate drive.

So, where are we at?

Model Ship World does not exist in any form. All files, photos, structure, posts, and data have gone.

Some will liken this to the 2013 crash, but that was different. In that instance, the drive itself failed, and the host failed in creating the backups we required. This time, we had a second drive that we were responsible for ourselves. Complete backups were made every other day, so we always had three backups. We did not fail in our duty to protect the 1TB of data we were guardians of. This was out of our control, and there will many sites around the world, including corporate/business sites, which have also been destroyed.

All we can do from this point is to move on. It will take us some time to recreate the site as members knew it. However, it will NOT have the posts, topics, and photos etc. It will be a fresh start.

Please bear with us while we look at this task, as our staff also have other regular jobs and need to fit this into their schedules.

We will be back though. Please bear with us at this time and give as much support as you can.

All the best,

The NRG Board and MSW Admin.
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A wealth of information. Hopefully they can recover a vast majority. That's a huge hit to the community.
 
Sadly the world we live in is fraught with fear from bad actors at every level.
I do hope authors have secure back ups of their own work.
This digital dependency is too fragile by far.
My deepest sorrow for our fellows at MSW.
 
pugwash said:
Sadly the world we live in is fraught with fear from bad actors at every level.
I do hope authors have secure back ups of their own work.
This digital dependency is too fragile by far.
My deepest sorrow for our fellows at MSW.
Click to expand...
Couldn't agree more.
A devastating loss...I learned a lot from there, and have MANY bookmarks saved. Now all gone.

Horrible news.
 

Model Ship World (MSW) - Cyberattack - Yikes, this is BAD

Just received this in my email: Dear Reginald, I'm reaching out with some difficult news that affects our entire community. Model Ship World — the Nautical Research Guild's online forum and one of the most important gathering places for ship modelers in the world — has been taken offline...
shipsofscale.com
 
I suspect they were attacked simply because their server was vulnerable. The hackers don't really care who they bring down. This is unfortunately the new reality with the new generations of AI that are so good at identifying weak spots in cyber security. It seems like the data is gone for good with no hope of recovery. A real tragedy.

I am new to the world of model ships, and found a real community and lots of information at Model Ship World. Hopefully I can find the same support here. I will soon be starting a build log on my current build, the Model Shipways Muscongus Bay Lobster Smack.

Maybe Ships of Scale should start a forum for old MSW members to commiserate and reconnect until MSW is started up again?
 
Maybe Ships of Scale should start a forum for old MSW members to commiserate and reconnect until MSW is started up again?

SoS is open to everyone just come on over we have plenty of room there is no MSW members and SoS members we are all on community and we just lost a neighborhood.
 
Dave Stevens (Lumberyard) said:
SoS is open to everyone just come on over we have plenty of room there is no MSW members and SoS members we are all on community and we just lost a neighborhood.
Click to expand...
MSW owners have some special views as to copyright issues. General public views accepted at SoS may be an obstacle for them to join SoS.
They for example forbid making references to SoS on their site (at least they didn’t allow this for me). When registering one had to agree not to buy and not to post build logs for kits of some manufacturers they themselves selected.
 
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Y.T. said:
The question is why these hackers did this? What is wrong with these people?
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You remember that line from Batman about some people just wanting to watch the world burn? A lot of young people are so desperate to have their voice be heard that they will do anything to make it heard. I am sure they are sitting around laughing their asses of about a bunch of old 'boomers' being upset at their actions and don't believe they will ever have to answer to anyone for what they have done. Well, most of us decrepit fogies didn't make it this far without realizing that what comes around goes around.
 
Y.T. said:
MSW owners have some special views as to copyright issues. General public views accepted at SoS may be an obstacle for them to join SoS.
They for example forbid making references to SoS on their site (at least they didn’t allow this for me). When registering one had to agree not to buy and not to post build logs for kits of some manufacturers they themselves selected.
Click to expand...

Control of MSW, owned and operated under the auspices of The Nautical Research Guild, a U.S. "501.c.3." not-for-profit tax-exempt corporation, was coopted by a number of ship model kit and aftermarket parts vendors who have since operated it as the primary advertising venue for their several businesses with the full authorization and support of the Nautical Research Guild and its several corporate officers and board directors. For a considerable period, MSW actively sought to unfairly compete with, if not destroy, Ships of Scale by a variety of actions, including, but not limited to, blocking and banning from participation in MSW any person who registered as a member of Ships of Scale. MSW further operated to the detriment of the scale ship modeling hobby by blocking and banning from participation in MSW anyone who bought, built, or discussed certain ship model kits made by other ship model kit vendors of whom they did not approve, and blocked, banned, and otherwise "chased off" numbers of highly experienced modelers, some being among the best and most prominent in the world, without cause or justification other than those modelers' disagreement with or criticism of ship model kits generally and specifically models sold by those vendors who had taken control of MSW.

This is not the first time MSW has suffered a "catastrophic loss" of all its data. A previous mysterious "wipe out" occurred in 2013 which also was exacerbated then, as now, by a less than fully explained failure to provide an effective provision for backing up MSWs entire database.

I ran an AI search asking whether the below statement published by MSW and The Nautical Research Guild was true:

In the last three days, there has been a global issue regarding the software that operates computer servers. This has impacted websites and servers around the world. An unscrupulous group of hackers had found a way around server security and had broken into many servers, destroying data.

Outages are tracked by a number of outage tracking services worldwide because information about "global issues" regarding server hacking is critical information for platform administrators everywhere. When any significant security breaches occur, they are immediately reported and likely become big news. This would certainly have triggered an AI response confirming some sort of "global" hacking event. Instead, I received the following response:

Copilot Search Branding

Recent Global Server Software Issue — What’s Happening

There is no confirmed report of a global server software security breach in the last three days that has been widely documented by major outage tracking sources. While there have been widespread internet outages in recent weeks, these have been attributed to network infrastructure failures, transit provider issues, and internal service problems, not to a coordinated hack that bypassed server security Network World+1.
  • Cloudflare Outage (Nov 18, 2025): A major outage affected many websites and platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure. Cloudflare blamed it on a spike in unusual traffic that caused a configuration file to grow beyond expected size, triggering a crash in its traffic management system. They stressed there was no evidence of malicious activity Ars Technica.
  • Hurricane Electric & Cogent Outages (Jan 2–31, 2026): These were network transit provider outages affecting multiple regions. For example, Hurricane Electric’s Los Angeles nodes went down for about an hour, impacting downstream partners in the U.S., Asia, and Europe Network World.
  • Ongoing Outage Tracking: Platforms like ThousandEyes and Entireweb Status show real-time maps of global internet health, but no recent “server security breach” event has been flagged as the cause of these disruptions ThousandEyes+1.
  • Outages ≠ Security Breach: Many large-scale outages are due to technical failures, configuration errors, or transit provider issues, not hacker exploits.
  • No Evidence of Hack: In the Cloudflare case, the company explicitly stated there was no evidence of malicious activity Ars Technica.
  • Security Breaches Are Different: If a server security breach had occurred, it would typically be reported by security firms, ISPs, or cloud providers, and would involve specific indicators like unauthorized access or data exfiltration.
Bottom line: The recent global server-related issues have been network and service outages, not a confirmed hack. If you are seeing widespread website failures, it’s more likely due to infrastructure or configuration problems than a coordinated security breach. For the most accurate, real-time updates, check live outage maps from ThousandEyes or Cloudflare Radar.

Know who your enemies are and never mistake one for a friend. Sometimes self-protection is the more prudent course than sympathetic platitudes and expressions of support. There was little on MSW that is not similarly contained in Ships of Scale where it is more accessible to users, having a much better search engine feature. To that end, this forum ought to welcome the members of MSW as refugee immigrants and encourage them to pitch their tents here and continue their ship modeling with us. They have no need to return to a "rebuilt" MSW which is, by its management's own admission, dead as a doornail and by its own fault bereft of all that their members had entrusted to its database.

And if anybody thinks I have an axe to grind against the management of MSW, damn straight I do. It's been years now and I still can't get the taste of their Kool Aid out of my mouth!
 
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Info/Announcement - Model Ship World Outage — Community Support and Update

Shipmates, Many of you have likely heard by now about the situation with Model Ship World. It is a deeply unfortunate loss for our community, and I want to take a moment to address it directly. First, let’s keep things in perspective. From everything we know, MSW itself was not specifically...
shipsofscale.com
 
Y.T. said:
The question is why these hackers did this? What is wrong with these people?
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They usually ask money. I have experienced this as a mod on another forum but somehow they managed to bring it back after 2 weeks. No data loses. Perhaps different occasion
 
Bob Cleek said:
...was coopted by a number of ship model kit and aftermarket parts vendors who have since operated it as the primary advertising venue for their several businesses with the full authorization and support of the Nautical Research Guild and its several corporate officers and board directors.
Click to expand...

As someone new to the hobby, I just joined the NRG. I di dnot know they were so commercial in their approach.

Bob Cleek said:
For a considerable period, MSW actively sought to unfairly compete with, if not destroy, Ships of Scale by a variety of actions, including, but not limited to, blocking and banning from participation in MSW any person who registered as a member of Ships of Scale. MSW further operated to the detriment of the scale ship modeling hobby by blocking and banning from participation in MSW anyone who bought, built, or discussed certain ship model kits made by other ship model kit vendors of whom they did not approve,
Click to expand...

This is not very friendly ... I did not know this.

Bob Cleek said:
In the last three days, there has been a global issue regarding the software that operates computer servers. This has impacted websites and servers around the world. An unscrupulous group of hackers had found a way around server security and had broken into many servers, destroying data.
Click to expand...

Are you suggesting that the error was more internal than external?

Bob Cleek said:
Know who your enemies are and never mistake one for a friend.
Click to expand...
Label me as naive but I like to think we can all work together. Seems this has not been the case in the past, and if so I understand the bitterness!
 
I joined both forums some years ago at about the same time.
It didn't take long to realise there was a degree of petty animosity towards this one, mainly from a small number of their admin and other associates.

One individual became incredibly vitriolic when there was conflict towards one of their longstanding members who was banned from the site.

My attempts at defending that member resulting in me receiving several slavering PM diatribes and threats, which I found offensive in the extreme.

Fortunately the vast majority of their members had different views, but that particular individual shared no truck with any dissenting voice while profiting heavily from the influence he had.

My only wish is that sort of behavior doesn't return and dominate when the MSW rises once again from the ashes.
 
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