Joy of the Internet

On 26th June, I was working on this website when I noticed some strange things occurring. Something was going very wrong and it took me a few minutes to suspect what it was. I just happened to be on the site when hackers managed to get into the server. Over the following hour, while I was running checks to ascertain whether my suspicions were correct, three more of my sites were hacked. I had server technicians onto it immediately but before they were able to stop the attack, hackers had managed to take out over 100 websites.

This site was almost completely destroyed and had to be deleted from the server. Luckily, I had backups but the backups were done before I had converted the website from the old content management system to this one. So, it was back to the drawing board to create a new site from scratch, then import and convert the backed up data into the new site. Council has been in recess for the past two weeks, so guess how I have been spending my recess? Several of the websites that were affected are sites that I manage for non-profit organisations. As the entire sites were each affected, impacting on email as well as the website itself, there has been (and still is) a lot of work to be done.

Some of my posts here have been lost forever, but not too many. Right now, I am not particularly well-disposed to the kinds of people that get their fun out of ruining other people’s websites.