Since the Axiom site has been de-hacked pages are loading blindingly fast again.

That begs the question:

What was that malicious code doing during the long delays and should we be worried that our computers have also been compromised in some way?

I suspect not, but its a good question to ask.

I've accessed this site from xp Vista and Win7 boxes using 3 different AV packages and have not had anything quarantined.

I'm wondering if I should go through the effort of downloading and running a bunch of tools to see what turns up.

Thoughts from the forum tech smart guys?

Most likely you won't find anything that wasn't already there from other sites. Any blatantly malicious code would have been caught by someone's anti-virus or anti-spyware. Now, what it does NOT account for is some sort of data-forwarding bot (sort of like a key-logger) that was capturing and forwarding all traffic between Axiom's servers and all of the clients (us) and firing it off to some hacker storage. That is gone, so nothing to track there either.

So you can (and should from time to time) run something like MalwareBytes on your computer, but you will find more crap dropped on your computer from other legit sites that are tracking your every move too (IE: Google and MANY others).

Was this most likely web based? I never experienced the slow forum that everyone was mentioning.. I wonder if this is because i am using a Mac and not a windows based machine?

The forum is the same speed as it always has been for me; everything loads nearly instantly. I access it from both a Windows and Linux machine, but I have stuff like NoScript installed, which protects me from most malicious scripts.

Good point. I run my browser on higher security levels, but have not expicitly blocked all scripting. Hmm... trade offs...

I allow the specific site I'm on to run local scripts, and then whitelist other sites as needed. But yeah, I don't recommend NoScript to anyone but the most savvy and paranoid users.

Hey guys,

I can assure you that the speed increase had nothing to do with "the event".

It just so happens that following up on some of the posts on the boards regarding speed, we had planned to move the site over to a new server and change the platform architecture from 32bit to 64bit.

While this was on our schedule for "soon", recent events gave us an opportunity to precipitate the transition.

I guess every cloud has a silver lining :-)

MadBeggar.

There goes that conspiracy theory.

Thanks for speeding up my access. It was driving me crazy, but I was just too lazy to contact Axiom to figure it out. That's the kind of stuff I do at work all day long.

You must be awesome at it!

I still get random locks/hangs on the forums. No noticeable difference to me.

So far, so good. No slowness noticed since the change.

Have you been talking to my grade 3 teacher?