Infiltrated Flight Simulator Community Site Still Offline

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» 24 May 2009

Infiltrated Flight Simulator Community Site Still Offline

Last May 12, a flight simulator site dedicated to enthusiasts of the simulation video game genre was utterly annihilated by an unexpected cyber attack. The senseless and gratuitous act of invading and destroying the popular and long-running Avsim website proved to be a major blow to the flight sim community and served as fuel to the ever-growing anti-hacking sentiment.

Originally founded and launched way back in 1996, the site made for flight simulator aficionados everywhere has been basically ruined beyond all hope of recovery care of the high-jinks of anonymous hackers. For the past decade or so, Avsim Online has served as a crucial resource of information and communication between flight sim fans, and yet the site has been completely erased from Internet existence after the hackers made quick work of the site's two servers in just one day.

According to Tom Allensworth, the founder of Avsim, "The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible." He noted that Avsim in totally offline as of the moment and he and his cohorts expect that to be the case for a long period of time. They have made no statements or predictions on the schedule of Avsim's return, and they're not sure if the site could be restored at all. He and his fellow administrators were devastated by the events and are uncertain of the site's future.

Tragically, avid readers of the flight simulator site may be in for a long, long wait because Avsim relied completely on the two downed servers, one of which served as the backup for the entire site. Because both servers were rendered inoperable by the hack attack and no external backup schemes had been executed, much of the site's 13-years-worth of archival information could be lost permanently.

PC Pilot editor Derek Davis says that the site has lost a countless number of forums and articles as well as terrains, skins, and mods developed by the enthusiastic flight sim community. He then commended Avsim's "immeasurable" contributions to flight sim fandom in a BBC interview.

This hacking incident serves as a lesson about the importance of having as many backups as possible in case of worst-case scenarios like this. Indeed, a lot of smaller sites don't even have a backup strategy in the first place. If you can make an external backup, that's good; if you can make backups for your backups, even better.

As of this writing, the site remains down for the count. Nevertheless, there's a silver lining in this cloud. Allenworth's cynicism aside, archives found in the Internet Archive of the Wayback Machine and a temporary forum setup for the die-hard flight sim fans provide hope of an eventual Avsim resurrection.