TotalFreedom Discord - Purge Info

Because the Discord is currently in a bad state and we've made the decision not to attempt to manually restore / re-create channels until we have heard back from Discord support around if it's possible for them to restore the discord from a previous backup they may have.

What we know so far - At 09:19 this morning, the main TotalFreedomBot went through and deleted nearly every channel on the Discord. We're unsure currently how this happened, but from what we can see it doesn't look to have involved the Freedom-01 gamemode where the bot is primarily used.

The bot along with any other bots Elmon maintains have been temporarily removed from the discord, and the bots permissions generally have been restricted to prevent this from happening again (Though this does impact their functionality).

We're not actively re-creating the discord until we have confirmation that the discord can / can not be restored, so will sit tight and see what Discord says.

Update - Thanks to some investigation work by Elmon, we're reasonably confident at this point of the chain of events. Due to legacy reasons when Seth originally deleted the discord and everything else, Fionn re-created the discord bot under his account, which Elmon then used to run the bridge and help administer the server.

From what we can currently tell Fionn still owns that Discord bot, the same one that deleted every channel in our Discord community.

It it our current belief that Fionn intentionally used the token from the bot to programmatically purge every channel on the TotalFreedom Discord server, likely after what transpired on this thread yesterday - https://forum.totalfreedom.me/d/2332-fionns-statement

We are still actively working with Discord to attempt to restore the server, and should that unfortunately not be possible we will look to start re-building the Discord from the ground up, and will look to put preventative measures in place to safeguard the server going forward.

Update - Our current understanding is that the bot was initially used at 09:19 AM BST where it deleted all of the channels in the TF Discord, except the 2 that Discord wouldn't allow (Discord mod channel and important information as they are mandatory for having a community server).

Steven then banned the TotalFreedom bot at 09:22AM this morning.

At the current time we are working on the assumption that any content shared in any channel on the discord since it's creation last October through to 09:22 today may be compromised, and while there is no evidence to suggest there were copies of these channels taken, we are now working on the assumption that it could well have happened prior to the deletion.

Update - Discord have finally got back to us this morning, and unfortunately as predicted Discord are refusing to restore our server from any sort of a backup. With that in mind the team are going to start looking at how we can re-build the Discord server to start to bring it back into normality. This will be a slow process as there's a lot of stuff we want to change now our hand has been forced into a clean slate setup.

We have also made some changes to help prevent this sort of thing from happening again, and will have more changes to make. The TF Bot's are now all owned by me and will continue to be owned exclusively by me, with access to the tokens better controlled going forward. We will also be improving the process for how we handle joiners / leavers with server access, to ensure such tokens are rolled which should help prevent unauthorised access. Finally we are also reducing the scope of the permissions that all of the bots will have, bots will going forward no longer be permitted the global administrator roles without me manually reviewing the use-case, and there being good reason other permissions are not sufficient.

As our trust in Discord as a SaaS offering has been broken, and they refuse to restore anything for us, we will also be looking to introduce our own backup solution which will allow us to backup the full servers content and channel templates on a regular basis so that should the worst happen in the future, we will have back-ups of all content and channels to allow us to restore as much as we can with ease.

Update - The discord staff team have been working through the various options for re-building the Discord, and have agreed for the most part on what that is now going to look like, we're hoping it should be a bit simpler than before, and things like permissions should end up being more rational across the estate, so we end up with less weird stuff going on.

We have also made some changes to our security in response to this incident, the TF Bot is now hosted on a VPS I manage as part of SN, which also means it's going to have the same uptime / availability as the main TF Server, and the bot identity is now owned by me under a new organisation in my Discord account.

We will be starting to re-build bit at a time with the areas that the Discord team here are happy the channels all make sense.

As part of this work we're also removing a number of the bots that just never got used or got used once and ignored, Mafia bot has already been removed, and we will be reviewing the other bots to work out where we can reduce the number of bots on Discord for the sake of having them there.