Sometime during the night on December 1, 2005, our server went down. At first, it appeared as if a hard disk had gone bad and all that needed to be done was to replace the disk and restore the databases from backup, a no-brainer task which would have taken roughly two hours to complete. However, once our brilliant and highly efficient IT guy took a closer look, he discovered something far worse than a failed hard drive: our web server had fallen victim to a malicious and deliberate Denial of Service attack.

A cyber terrorist somehow managed to get root access to our server to plant a worm that thoroughly destroyed it down to its configuration. This attack affected not only this web site, but our commercial business sites as well. This is not a problem that can be easily solved with a simple backup restore. Everything must be re-built from scratch, which is still being done as I type.

I’m almost back. The database is back on line, email is working (sort of) and Feed2JS is finally caching news feeds again. If anyone notices anything strange, such as PHP error messages where content should be, please leave a comment on this post to let me know.

If the cyber terrorist is watching, he or she should know that we have log files and lots of other data that we plan to turn over to the authorities.