Lower Ramu Bible Translation Ministry

Well, that was interesting.   Somehow last month our web site and blogs were all hacked by some deviant.   The hack inserted a small snippet of code into about 100 different files on the sites.  Then whenever someone tried to access our web site, the code tried to copy itself to the users computer.   From there it directed the user to a bogus internet security site.  As viruses go, this was relatively harmless, but it was a very big pain in the rear to get it off our server.

A couple days after the hack, we became aware of what had happened and immediately took the site down until we could figure out how to fix things.  Then this morning with an abundant supply of coffee in hand I set about restoring all the affected files to their pristine cleanliness.  Anyone who has worked with a content management systems and current blogging software knows what a chore that is.   Our web site and blogging software have about 5000 files in hundreds of directories.  Fortunately all the files that were affected were hit at about the same time on the same day.  So it was just a matter of looking through all the files and replacing the ones that had that time and date stamp.

There is probably an easier way to have done that but not being completely sure of what I was doing I figured this was the safest bet.  Finally after about four hours of work I was ready to try things out.  I put the site back on line, typed in the address, and wonder of wonders, everything reappeared.  It is amazing when things like that happen, especially when working with computers.

So I made a complete backup of our site and blogs, upgraded all the software, changed passwords, and hopefully made the site impervious to attacks.  But just in case I am going to be monitoring things closely for awhile.

We hope that no one was hit by this virus through or sites.  If you were, our apologies.   I suppose it is a reminder to us all to keep their antivirus software up to date.