Linux Web-zine rebuilds after malicious Net attack

The site's founding editor, Kimberly Shelt, initially decided to close the publication citing lack of spare time to re-build the site.

"I have sadly come to the decision that now is the time to put LinMagAu to bed," she wrote in an email to the site's patrons.

However after receiving numerous e-mails from the open source community pledging support to re-build the site which had just passed its first birthday, Shelt had a change of heart.

"I didn't want to see the Web site go to bed but I could not do it alone. I also did not want to put it up half-heartedly. With the work being evened out to other volunteers, the possibility of having it back up again is great," Shelt said.

Shelt estimates that with the help of volunteers the Website will be back up and running on another machine in the next few weeks.

Shelt still doesn't quite know how attackers managed to breach the server's security and destroy the site.

"As far as I know the machine is extremely secure but as of the moment, we really do not know what caused the problem," Shelt said.

Partial diagnostics show no solid proof that the attack was a result of the scripts used in the site, however Shelt said there was a high probability it was a virus-related password breach.

According to Shelt, it's possible that a dummy.class trojan later found on a PC running Windows on her mixed home network was behind the breach. Currently, the network administrator examining the machine has not discovered evidence of the real cause of the problem.

Kimberly Shelt started the community magazine to cater for local open source and Linux developers over a year ago.

The attack on LinMagAu follows a spate of recent Web defacements targeting volunteer, open source, developer enthusiast sites in the United Kingdom and Australia.