We were hacked

Quick update, we suffered a pretty bad hacker attack on the 27th. Unsure how they got in and pretty confident they left other back doors smattered through the server, we purged everything… I mean literally, I deleted everything on the server, everything on the 30+ domains I have, maybe half a dozen active web apps, and 4 or 5 blogs.

Anyone familiar with the web will know that it doesn’t matter how great your backup, recreating all that from backup files is a nightmare.

To put it bluntly I was pretty depressed about the whole thing, toyed with just giving up. “If people want to have links to viagra sites that badly that they trash sites I’m doing for free with no personal gain, I just give up” were my thoughts.

Well it turned out that 3 hours of work this evening after work, and I’ve got teh site back up. The image sample feature (that was in extreme alpha) has been removed – for fear it might be the back door they used. Not sure how or when I’ll add that back in, sorry if you liked the feature.

There is no guarantee that by tomorrow morning EST, I won’t have been hacked again, if that happens, I’m unsure what to do… but rest assured, I’m planning on trying to keep this site running as long as I can.

Totally side note, I’m planning on allow people to post to hexday via Twitter – without need for an actual Hexday account.

Once the feature is live, simply posting to twitter a message that includes @hexday and a valid hex value starting with a #, and the hexday app will add that color, against that twitter user name. So still only 1 a day (we’ll ignore any additional ones) and you’ll still be able to see all the posts by a person. I thought it would be an interesting input mechanism. Still a lot of work to go – like code it, but I’ll keep things updated.

Thanks for your patience whilst we sort all this stuff out and have a great hexday !

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Published:
04.29.09 / 9pm
by JP
Category:
Uncategorized