Dear SAS Members,
Today we have good news and bad news for you. Not really worth an announcement but we though we should let you know.
The bad news is that we became victim of unauthorized access to an Editor Account of the SAS.
The good news is that all your personal data remains safe.
Since even the owners of this forum have no chance to either reveal the password of other accounts of our forum, nor accessing personal messages or abuse other member's accounts for posting etc., the criminals who abused the Editor Account of SAS had no chance to do so either.
Those who don't feel safe with this can change their account password at any time, that's up to you.
The editor account leak has been patched two days ago.
Further measures have been taken to avoid similar situations in the future.
The criminals' accounts have been identified and suspended.
The owners of those criminal accounts have confessed their activities, however the destinations where all the stolen content and information have been leaked to so far are only known to a limited extend.
It's sad that certain members of the IL-2 modding community take this game serious up to a point where they don't even refrain from criminal activities, trying to cause harm to the SAS at any cost.
The Editor Account fraud remained undetected for exactly 4 weeks, this sheds a different light on recent mod releases "elsewhere" too, since a very prominent mod of these days has been worked on among the Editors of SAS for about half a year already - the timeframe for the release at a different location right now just fits.
Following this account fraud, over at "the other side" at least 4 WIP mods which have been confidential so far have been leaked as well, this includes the Hawker Hunter and the English Electric Canberra (both internal SAS WIPs have been posted there publically, threads have been pulled meanwhile), the P-51R "Galloping Ghost" (screenshots remain visible in the F7F release thread there) and the Mirage III (announcement for a public release to be expected soon in the same F7F thread over there).
In the recent past we once again had to face serious accusations, personal attacks, insults and indignity for releasing an improved version of a mod
- based on freeware 3rd party sources
- containing SAS mods
- requiring further SAS mods to work
- while giving full credit to the alleged original authors
while at the same time the same people who complain about this had no hesitation to perform criminal activities against us.
Once again a line has been crossed and we will not hesitate to take further legal action if need be.
Account fraud is illegal all over the world, and in the countries where the responsible persons live high penalties can be imposed for doing so.
It's sad to see how some people seem to have no other thing in mind but causing damage to us and to the IL-2 modding community as a whole.
Speaking of the IL-2 modding community, we hope that there is not doubt about the stance towards criminal acts like this.
This is no "it depends" thing, it's black or white, yes or no. You can either condemn or support such actions, there is no inbetween.
While other community site's concept of cyber crime is not our business, we will take note of the reactions and it goes without saying that we don't see no need for the SAS to be a comfortable place for those who deliberately try to cause damage to us and to our beloved game.
These attempts to cause damage come along in different ways.
Any kind of criminal attacks against a community site for sure falls into that category.
Taking a project from a working group pre-release is clearly theft and falls into that category too.
Besides these obvious criminal activities another less recognized way of trying to kill IL-2 modding is the attempt to apply 'Copyrights' to released freeware work.
Rest assured we will not support this silly 'Copyright' business, we won't let anyone dictate what shall be allowed in modding or not.
SAS was founded precisely to break these types of absurd chains, it's the freedom of modding that made us the biggest and, even more important, most enjoyable IL-2 modding website on this planet.
For the latter we would like to thank you, our members, who keep up this atmosphere of educated well behaving people, quite in contrast to certain places where every second post is filled with nothing but hate, envy and disgust.
We don't need to put up "FREE" posters across our banners, we're free by nature.
Let's try to keep up the good atmosphere here.
What happens elsewhere happens elsewhere, it's not our business.
Everyone's entitled to form his/her own opinion and we encourage you to do so.
Recent events show that nothing's like it seems to be at first glance, it's always worth a second thought.
Yours sincerely
The SAS Administration
P.S.: Please feel free to post your comments if you like, whether or not you agree with us.
We know that different perceptions exist of what has been done, how it has been done and what might have been done better.
We're by no means infallible. Constructive criticism is always welcome, this gives us the chance to improve and/or explain the reasons behind certain decisions.
We just ask you to keep it civil and we beg for your understanding that we might not answer to each and every question within a second or two, we've got some lifes to live too
Author
Topic: Criminal Activities against SAS (Read 10914 times)
