Wednesday morning we received notification from the hosting company that our account was suspended due to a reported phishing attacked hosted on the site.
Our abuse department has received a report of phishing being hosted on an account under your direct control. We do apologize for any inconveniences, however, to help prevent further abuse reports until this matter can be addressed, we were forced to disabled site access for your account.
They gave us no details of the report or phishing attack. However they did off to give us root cause for a fee and tried to sell us 3rd party security service.
There had been plans to move away from this hosting provider and make the site https: compliant by year end. So this just accelerated the time line.
After about 1/2 day digging in, it was determined that a well know streaming company was behind the "report" to the hosting company. After further investigation into the issue, it was determined that there was no phishing exploit on our site "targeted at their customers", but rather someone had posted a link to a Chinese pirate site that was making one of their movies available for free. So basically, the streaming company was falsely using "phishing attack on their customers" to shut down our forum because there was a link posted that they did not approve of.
Migrating a forum at the spur of the moment created some challenges and did not go as quickly as hoped for. On the positive side of things, the forum now has a SSL certificate and can be accessed securely with https. Hopefully the outage is behind us at this point, but I am still working with the new hosting company to tweak some things, so there could be some performance/access issues over the next day or two.
Thank you for your patience during this transition.
