HACKERS

19th April
Hackers

A friend of mine sends me an email telling me he could not view any of my images on my website. Not thinking much of it I had a quick look to see if I had the problem as well from my end. No images could be viewed and I started to feel a little concerned but didn’t want to worry to much as I thought it was just a glitch that could be overcome quite quickly. I then emailed my web designer Ron who quickly responded the next morning with a phone call that I missed as I was working. When I saw the missed call from him I knew it had to be bad and quickly found a quiet spot whilst working to call him back.
He confirmed the severity of the problem and explained that hackers had managed to find a way in and corrupt all my images. OK I said and asked him if my Service provider got a back up of the site. No he said they were washing their hand of it and said I should have backed it up myself. Well if someone had told me that I needed to and showed me how too I would have done this upon construction. Ron had a very heated discussion with the manager and nothing was resolved. Feeling quite calm but annoyed I asked what needed to be done with a fair idea that I was going to have to reload all the images and information and captions. He confirmed that’s what was likely to take place but suggested I wait until the return phone call from Smarty Host. Nothing would get resolved before I left for my trip so I just had to leave a message on my website about what had happened and reloaded a few shots. I have learned a serious lesson from this and the site will now be backed up for maximum protection. Ron told me that the hacker got in via my blog site and so all reference to my website has now been removed. This is devastating but it could have been worse. At least I still have the all the information pages in tact as just the galleries that have been affected. I will be starting to reload well over 700 images when I get back from my trip. To the moron that did this you seriously need to get a life.