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.
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Original Articles Copyright 2004-2008 by Margaret Romao Toigo
Hello Margaret,
Appalled to learn what happened. I’ve tried to view your site and email you through the weekend but could do neither.
If you have a moment, swing by BlogCritics Comment of the Day and take a look at the entry for Friday…
Well, thank you for selecting one of mine as comment of the day!
The server just came back up this morning. It had to be re-built from scratch and the backups had to be restored manually, one directory at a time. Everything is supposed to be working now, but it will take some time to work all the bugs out.
How can I contact Margaret Romao Toigo?
Anyone have the email address?