P.O.D.

Saturday morning started off with a bang. I sat down at my desk at D.C. Cook (we are in the middle of a refueling outage, so I'm pretty much living there right now) and found this e-mail from Lee Johnson.

Just thought I'd let you know that the SSN-680 site has been hacked by some group that says they are from Saudi Arabia! It did NOT attach anything to my computer when I hit the link though. Thought I'd let you know! Good luck taking out the trash! :)

As a site administrator, that has roughly the same effect as waking up to the sound of the collision alarm! So I jumped over to the website, and sure enough, I found an entertaining and visually appealing message (not!) from some poor misguided son of Islam, who went on to suggest that "I bear witness to God but Allah" (sic) and "I bear witness that Mohammad is his slave and messenger". Well, there's a fine howdy-do, I said. I'd show you his handiwork, but he doesn't deserve the privilege of additional air-time I'd give him by posting his hack.

The rest of the day was an exercise in jumping through the hoops of changing all the master access passwords, and frantic scrambling with server security in a effort to prevent recurrence, which is sort of like trying to shut the inner door on tube four after you unlatched it with the outer door open.

If you accessed the site while all that was going on, you would have seen this:

About six hours later, a few dozen phone calls, and I was ready to restore the hacked page and turn the site back on.

And here it is - back in business after having most of my day wasted by some dirtbag with too much time on his hands that thinks he can hide behind a curtain of electronic anonymity.

Website hacked, me hacked off, and him in hack, by me. Hell of a way to end a day.

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Brad Williamson
Bryan, there is no indication that any member's personal information or the site database were compromised. We have reinforced security protocols and continue to monitor the site for unusual activity. Please report anything suspicious.
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Bryan McCall
So did this scumbag just hack and post, or were there any accounts hacked or compromised?
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