Well first off, I really pondered responding to this thread as I didn’t care to be lashed out at by members of this or any other community here on the internet.
Now from someone whom use to design firewall software to protect interactive software on line such as the UBB…..
Hacker
<person, jargon> (Originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe)
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in "a Unix hacker". (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. (Deprecated) A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". The correct term is cracker.
Cracker
<jargon> An individual who attempts to gain unauthorized access to a computer system. These individuals are often malicious and have many means at their disposal for breaking into a system. The term was coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of "hacker". An earlier attempt to establish "worm" in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?" -- Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler synonym for "white trash".
Now with that all said….
You have to know several things to determine what actually happened and how someone gained access to your UBB and or site.
Gaining access to your UBB and making themselves an administrator can easily be done by accessing the MySQL Database and changing a members access value from user to administrator directly in the user database for the UBB users.
This can be done if you have access to the database server through the web site your running on or through another web site with some sort of access to the database through a different software such as “ZenCart” that does not have very many security checks in relation to the database through the software.
Also you may need to know if the server including the MySQL server is running Linux or Windows. This also has a sort of relation on how the database is accessed that your message board aka UBB is using.
Now it is easy for any host, and many of them will for sure, point the finger at the first person whom reports a problem such as yours as the cause of the problem as having the actual problem with the unauthorized access to the site or database. You see it is much easier to just say it was the software on YOUR web site then actually investigate and find out what really happened.
Banning the person or his IP address really is not the fix if the access was gained through someone else’s web site to yours. You need to find out how the access was actually gained and fix that before you can do other things to make your site secure and rid your self of the “cracker” that gained access to your site.
No need to debate here on the terms defined in this post. To bad people are not just to lazy to actually learn something, like the news reporters that make the wrong terms popular, and get off their lazy rear ends and learn something.
