Many of you who follow our website closely might have noticed that some of the recent content is missing. It seems our site crashed. While we are still looking into the cause, fortunately we had the foresight to regularly back up our site and content so that we were quickly able to restore most of what was lost. Unfortunately, however, anything that was added subsequent to our last restore point is lost. That means if you posted a comment some time within the past couple of days, there is a good possibility that your comment is gone.
Our IT team is investigating the cause of the crash to determine whether it was a technological failure of something malicious,
Where was Ron Book when the site crashed?
My bet is grady fudd
I blame Ron and Lauren Book.
Please be aware that ransomware style cyberattacks have spiked dramatically over the last few months and have exponentially increased at a shocking rate over the last couple of weeks. The news is not covering this much with a few exceptions.
As a cybersecurity researcher myself, this stuff interests me greatly but it is quite alarming to see the lack of security virtually everywhere. Backups are not enough and you need a better strategy for dealing with cyberattacks of varying kinds. Ransomware attacks are particularly bad because they often end up extorting money in exchange not to dump highly sensitive information on the dark web for other cybercriminals to leverage for further attacks.
Backups are only good if they are free of malicious payloads. The only way to guarantee this is to place tools to monitor your filesystem for changes where it counts, preferably outside the system. I use docker containers to run all my websites and services and use docker’s built in tools to inspect for alterations in these containers. All changes are sent to a central Prometheus server where I can trigger email alerts and SMS alerts for abnormal behavior while ignoring common stuff that are expected. If there is a sudden change that was not expected or falls outside of the normal, such as a new file appearing in the filesystem of any of the containers, I can instantly re-deploy a fresh copy of that container from an image, destroying the compromised version. I can also inspect the logs for that container to determine exactly how the possibly malicious file got there. I can then patch my container and deploy a new version as an image so that any other containers build on that would automatically get redeployed with the fix with absolutely no downtime at all.
This is a bit extreme, but extreme measures are needed today if you are serious about security. Hopefully your team is familiar with the concept of Docker containers. They are probably the easiest type of containers to implement.
My gut feeling is, someone who does not like the cause we stand for “Rights for ex offenders” hacked the site. I mean Hell, The U.S Government has been hacked recently along with many other high profile agencies, companies etc.
Glad you back things up. A few lost comments are a small price to pay for at least having not lost everything.
FAC did this on purpose to remind us not to take our tech volunteers for granted 🙂
I believe the governor’s IT team is behind it. Or aliens. Both
Rick I was thinking the same thing. So if we r right about the aliens could they be prosicuted if we can find them?.
I think we should just put all galactic aliens on a registry for life. And have a statute limiting how close they can be to Earth. Say 100,000 miles. And then if they don’t register their spaceships then slap a class 3 felony on them. Yeah….this will win votes. Jeez – no more coffee in afternoon
`Whatever kind of coffee you are having, I want some.