No doubt many Flightsim users have found that AVSIM s servers have been down for a few days.
Here is the reason..........................

What a sad minority have no doubt deemed as being "fun".
This also will mean no more World of AI updates.


PRESS RELEASE:

AVSIM Hacked

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

END

Best Regards,

Tom Allensworth

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PIA B747 image copyright Nasir Khawaja. Use by kind permission of Nasir Khawaja

It was a shock to hear what's happened to Avsim.
There are some sad people in this world who need to get a life
I just hope nobody does the same to Flightsim.com or else we flightsimmers are gonna be in alot of trouble...

On a happier note, World of AI has always been available on Flightsim - there just never use to be any direct links to the download page.
Now in the light of whats happened to Avsim, World of AI have now changed all their links to the Flightsim site.
Avsim might be gone (for now) but we still have World of AI

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I don't believe this! I mean why would anybody hack a flight sim website! This is really frustrating....AVSIM was amongst the best FS download sites.... could it be done by other competing firms? I would really wish AVSIM recover

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See you at vpia.org

Virtual Pakistan International Airlines - The Wings of Pakistan!

Maybe they're data mining on us all

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PIA all the way!

sad news to read.....hope they recover soon and regarding the data i expect they will be having a regular backup on external drives for safety measures.

btw, supposed to be posted in World Aviation Photos & Hobby forum

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Raihan Shahzad
VATSIM - West Asia - Pakistan vACC/vARTCC (S1)


EY-B77W, A345, A320, A319, GF-L1011, B732, A332, A320, A319, KU-A343, AB6, A310, A320, PK-B707/720, B733, AB4, A310

Good News coming on 19th May:

We placed the order for the hardware this morning. We ordered some significantly powerful machines. These systems will be delivered Thursday night in time for our tech team to install them on Friday, the 22nd.

HARDWARE:

Due to the generosity of hundreds of community members, we will be able to bring online sometime over the weekend an AVSIM System that all of us will be proud of, I am sure.

High on our list of attributes that these new systems will provide are:

Virtualization
Clustering
Load Leveling
We will be effectively running the equivalent of 20 servers in two boxes.

In addition, we have purchased a 3Com 5500G 1 Gigabit 24 port switch to replace the existing 3C router.

I don’t want to bore you with the details, but here is the inventory of systems that will be brought back online Saturday or Sunday:

• Two HP Proliant DL380 G5’s with quad core Xeon E5450 processors working at 3 GHz.
• 32 GIG of DR2 Ram per G5
• 1.2 terabytes of storage on each G5 using 4 x 300 GB SATA-300/SAS drives.
• In addition, we will be bring back online, or repairing to bring online, our existing three severs, GREEN, PURPLE and WHITE
• We will also bring our NAS back into operation as our primary storage device for the system array.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE AND FUNCTIONALITY:

I am going to put my neck on the line here a bit based upon a briefing I received today, and say that our confidence is building about the state of the library. It is my hope that we can have our legacy library back up and running on Sunday. Our email system would also be back in operation.

We will have a Web site back and operating sometime over the weekend. If we can get the old system up and running, great. If not, we’ll create a redirect page for all three domains back to this forum system. In the meantime, the design team continues to work on the web and library redesigns and we will bring them online as soon as the team gives us the go ahead.

As for the Forums system; our confidence is increasing in that there may be something retrievable there. Again, we won’t know until we can inspect the material that we have since recovered and placed on WHITE for storage. More on that later.

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Tom Allensworth
AVSIM Online

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Best Regards / Wa´alaikumusalam

This is good news and looking very possitive for the return of AVSIM.
So Fingers crossed and good luck.

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PIA B747 image copyright Nasir Khawaja. Use by kind permission of Nasir Khawaja

That's awesome. thanks for posting will all the data be recovered?

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PIA all the way!