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LAST UPDATE | 26 Nov 2021
STORM ARWEN IS bringing strong winds to Ireland today as Met Éireann warns of a risk of high seas and toppled trees.
The forecaster has issued Status Yellow wind warnings for Donegal, Mayo, and Sligo, while the UK Met Office has done the same for all of Northern Ireland.
There’ll be cold, windy and showery weather for the rest of the day, it said, with sleet and snow on high land.
At noon today, there were rain showers recorded at the weather stations in Belmullet, Finner, Gurteen, Knock and Sherkin Island, with recent rain, clouds, and drizzles recorded elsewhere around the country.
In the UK, the Met Office has upgraded its warning to a red alert for parts of Scotland and the north of England.
Starting in the afternoon and continuing in the evening and night, northerly winds are expected to reach average speeds of 45 to 65km per hour with gusts of 90 to 110km per hour.
Along north facing costs and on the Inishowen Peninsula, “significantly higher” gusts are forecasted.
In Donegal, the Status Yellow warning comes into effect this afternoon at 3pm and lifts tomorrow at 6am.
The warning in Mayo and Sligo is set to ease slightly earlier at 5am.
In Northern Ireland, the UK Met Office has imposed a Yellow wind warning from 9am this morning until midnight and is cautioning that high winds could bring some travel disruption and damage.
Two marine warnings preempt northern or strong gales on coasts from Fair Head to Carlingford Lough to Carnsore Point on the Irish Sea (Status Orange); and for all coasts and on the Irish sea (Status Yellow).
In a statement yesterday, Met Éireann meteorologist Elizabeth Coleman said today will be “cold and very windy”.
“Gale to strong gale force winds are forecast along north facing coasts, generating large coastal waves and spray overtopping,” Coleman said.
She warned that strong northerly winds over land in the north and northwest could bring down some trees and power lines.
“This system will generate high seas too, in the north and west through Friday, with the storm force winds and high seas transferring to the Irish Sea on Friday night.
In the UK, the Met Office has issued a rare red warning for parts of north-east England and Scotland, cautioning that flying debris leading to injuries or danger to life is likely.
The warning, which is the maximum issued by the Met Office, indicates that the impact is likely to be high.
The red alert warns of the potential for damage to buildings and homes, with roofs blown off and power lines brought down.
The alert warns people in the zone of the potential of “roads, bridges, and railway lines closed, with delays and cancellations to bus, train, ferry services and flights” and of “large waves and beach material being thrown on to coastal roads, sea fronts and homes”.
Earlier, UK Met Office spokesperson Stephen Dixon told the PA news agency that the worst-affected areas will “predominantly be on the coasts, with gusts of over 75mph bringing possible disruption to travel and longer journey times, power cuts, flying debris and large waves, with beach material being thrown around”.
Storm Arwen is moving in from the North Sea and will travel south before easing on Sunday, he said.
With reporting by Press Association
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So, basically, the boards.ie administrator was a dunce.
Agreed, this was no hack the administrator of boards was negligent using the same password for two different services. It amazes me how lax people are with passwords, pet name year of birth etc.
Hey that’s victim blaming ……. Oh wait .. yeah it is a bit like leaving a BMW unlocked in Dolphins Barn with a laptop and Iphone in view and expecting nothing to happen.
That part of the report was taken from his submission which we couldn’t cross examine as he pleaded guilty. Its factually incorrect as the password was unique and not used on Twitter. It was also a strong password and we believe it was snatched during a “man-in-the-middle” attack.
Boards.ie/journal.ie are the same company, how much of this article can be taken at face value ?
I hope you were referring to the site administrator when you said Muppet!
Shocking lack of security on behalf of boards.ie really amateur stuff!
Or how about changing the headline to – Script Kiddy discovers gaping hole in Boards.ie security, boards thank him for identifying the hole and have since upgraded their security policy.
Companies pay kids like this to run penetration testing on their IT systems, having your IT admin use the same password on his twitter as for the server is a big facepalm.
Very surprised he didn’t go through a proxy for his hacking especially when he was a bit of a whizz kid.
Whizz kids usually use 7 proxies.
Yeah he’s a bit of a dope to get caught. Using his own ip address; scarlet for him.
How did such a security flaw cost boards.ie 30,000 Euro? All they had to do was delete the unauthorised file and change passwords. I’d say Boards.ie just exaggerated the claim to deck out their office and buy a couple of new servers, ipads, Macbooks etc
My password is my first name.
Boom?
Its factually incorrect to say the same password was used on Twitter. It wasn’t. The password was unique, it was also a strong password and we believe it was snatched during a “man-in-the-middle” attack.
OK buddy, we get you
Who are you trying to kid, Tom?
I remember having a few pints with you in town one night around that time, and I had a quick look at your phone when you were in the jacks*.
All of your passwords were the same. TomLuvsBords4Lyfe
*That chick who was pretending to be a journalist made me do it. She was hot, and I thought I had a chance.
Sorry for being the “Man-In-The-Middle”. :(
By the way, what year is that screenshot from?
When I look at the level of moderation on that site I am not surprised that the admins would be clueless. No surprises that this place is linked to them.
A bit OTT to extradite someone over something like this, no?
How is this hacking if you have the password ?
” Playing a game” They never change, do they? Kids will be kids!
I remember my first hacking back in 1983. I thought I was hacking into a video games company’s computer, to play all their unreleased games, but, it turned out, I was accidentally hacking into a NORAD supercomputer that was using games like chess as military simulators to calibrate how to react in a situation where the USA and the USSR began launching missiles, to spare as many lives as possible. I remember the designer, Dr Falken, used a backdoor password called “Joshua,” that the NORAD people weren’t aware of. I figured it out after doing some intense studying on the guy, and realised that was the name of his late son. So, me and a friend started playing this game on WOPR, that was the supercomputer’s name, called “Global Thermonuclear War,” and we started bombing cities like Las Vegas and Seattle, thinking we were playing a game, meanwhile, at NORAD, they thought the Russians were sending missiles their way. Long story short, after an arrest, an escape, a meeting with Dr Falken on his reclused island, we got back in time before the US responded to the phantom bombs, only for WOPR to try and overtake the system and figure out the code to send the missiles itself! So, we figured we’d let it play a game of tic-tac-toe, a game it couldn’t win or lose at, and it realised that there was no winning and decided not to play any more and decided not to set off the missiles.
God, those were the days!
I wonder who inserted my name into Irish waters database…. I didn’t…
My password is password.
How did he get the Twitter password? Was it hacked too?
I would imagine the sript kiddy used some kind of a widely known exploit to crack the password, if it cracked easy then it was unlikely very strong… provbably something like ‘ilikeboards’ or ‘boards123′
wysiwyg
Give that young man a job, he clearly knows more than others about IT security.
1Password enough said would end that problem in terms of using same password
It won’t take long for his next attempt and he won’t be caught.
He already works for the CIA.
A year suspended sentence is a bit harsh.
ok so how did he actually get Twitter password?
as by the sound of it he actually hacked Twitter not boards ie – he just logged onto boards.ie as proper user (admin)
Amateur. My password is passw0rd. They will never guess the o is a 0.
What’s with your quoting wysiwyg? And why should he get a job when his intentions are to falsify and steal from others? Any reason or answer?
Quoting wysiwyg was an example of “easy to guess” passwords. From reading that article, it suggests the site admin has used same/similar credentials for multiple accounts, which is extremely bad practice.
It states in the article that the hacker in this case didn’t divulge it share this information, instead the hack was to prove how easily it was in fact done.
The fact the hacker was only 17 at the time, probably had a bearing on a non custodial sentence.
Along a similar line, you’ll find AV vendors have actually hired people who wrote/spread malicious viruses, as they clearly have the ability to program and bypass security.
Hence my logic.
Give the lad a job, clearly he could seal up a few holes.
have your say