A little over a week ago, on a quiet Friday evening with no plans to visit shows to look for quality exhibitors, Howard opens an email from one of our exhibitors telling us our website has been hacked.
Both our hearts sank as we opened the laptop and saw an image of Einstein with the words below: You’ve been hacked . . . because we wanted to.
We took comfort in the fact that it was July and we don’t have another show until September. It wasn’t until the next morning that we realized this was especially bad timing since we had a full page, color ad in the monthly magazine supplement of the Star Ledger advertising our 30th Anniversary year and our fall shows. It was a great looking ad going, that day, directly to 100,000 high income homes; but now no one could go to our website to learn more about us or our shows. Ugh! (go to the “photo” on my page to check out the great ad Howard created)
Ever being the detective, Howard went into the invisible counter on our website to see who had been on Friday. There was someone from Morocco on it for 19 minutes. All other visitors had only been on very briefly. So we have concluded that someone, from very far away, because he or she could, hacked our site. Not a good feeling.
Fortunately for us, our webmaster (a former student of Howard’s) got it down immediately and after spending a week repairing and checking for any hidden surprises, got it back up this past Friday.
Have any of you had this experience? It sure does raise the question, why us and all the way from Morocco!
Comments
Larry:
Our webmaster did have a back up to our site but had concerns with putting it back up immediately. Yes, he is a former student, but has worked in the tech industry for the past 15 years. He is brilliant but likely has Asperger's and can be an odd duck, at times.
I was hacked a couple of years ago - they had actually entered through one site and then hacked everyone on that server! My webdesigner got it back up within a day or so, thankfully, as it was right near Xmas.
I can't quite grasp what sort of people they are that have nothing better to do with their time than make mischief which ends up in costs and heartache to those affected.
Your problem was that it took a week, and for that you are fortunate. It could have taken a lot longer. It's a common problem with artists who have a relative, friend, friend of a friend, student, etc. build a web site and it's not their business. A few years ago, I built a website for an artist who had a teacher friend give it to his class as an assignment. By the end of the term, the web site wasn't finished and the artist had already gone through about twenty shows promoting an under construction web page. It took me three days to build it, starting from scratch, which is always faster than trying to fix someone else's problems. Heck, I had an artist call me this past Sunday afternoon and she was able to see her web site the next morning.
And no, I'm not looking for web site work. I'm just pointing out that using a friend, relative or whatever is never the best choice, especially in an emergency.
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100