I really didn’t pay any attention to it. I mean, why would you? We all get them daily, “Attention, your site has been compromised”, “Warning, you may have illegal access on your server” etc etc. I get very few into my actual inbox, as my spam filter picks them all up automatically. This one for some reason came to my inbox.

No problem, I thought, had a quick scan of it with my eyes, just to check, but no – all looked quite spammy to me. So, I did what I normally do and just hit delete. It was written in the style of making it look professional to make people read it, (which is why I did), but it all seemed too unlikely that I paid it no attention.

However, being cautious, I loaded up my site straight away and went through every page, just to see if there were any potential changes that I didn’t make, and wording out of place, weird formatting changes etc. Nope, all looked fine. Phew. False alarm, as predicted.

That is, until I received a text message on Sunday night from the guy that hosts my site, saying that it’s been hacked and has been shut down! ‘Oh dear’, I thought, or words similar in meaning. This isn’t good. He said he’d been contacted by the technical team at my hosts, they’ve detected things that shouldn’t be on there, and for safety, have shut down my site so nothing else could be done.

For most of Monday, I was on skype with my host and my web guy, in a three-way chat window, whilst we were trying to figure out what things had been uploaded to my server, and how quickly we could get rid of it. It took him some digging, but found 3 or 4 pages that had been uploaded last Friday which were made too look like bank login pages. The cheeky scamps. I’ve no idea if they were indeed successful for the hackers in question, but they were removed immediately, as well as some dodgy ‘scripts’ that were causing more trouble, including an additional Trojan horse virus in one of the parts of my site.

That last bit was quite scary to me, as horses are quite sinister at the best of times. Luckily my web guy, Mick, managed to remove everything malicious, de-bug everything, protect the place where they managed to gain entry from, and updated everything that needed updating.

Absolute lesson learned, to make sure everything in the back end of your site is as up to date as can possibly be. My CMS was apparently a version behind, and that was enough for this canny hacker to find the weakness and gain entry. So, if you’re not sure if your site is as secure as can be, I highly recommend you check, or get your web person to do it on your behalf.

So, by around 3pm on Monday, everything was back to normal and my site was back online. It had been down for approximately 16 hours, but that could have been a lot worse, or meant building it again from scratch. My now-learned advice – back up everything, and keep it all up to date. Big Brother is apparently always watching!

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist

Podcast 2 – August 09 - “Time Lords, Averting Backup Disaster In Business, & Google Chrome – The OS Killer?” (13m 11s)

This episode we’re talking about being a Time Lord, how backups are vitally important in businesses, plus I’m talking to Gavin Moorhouse from Lucid Computer Solutions who’s going to be talking us through the best of the bunch for backups, and Google Chrome – is it going to be the OS killer?

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Rather exciting news was announced this week, with Google taking on the challenge of creating an operating system to rival Mac OS and Windows. They’ve stated that they will release an open source version later this year for developers to modify and play with it, and potentially improve it, with a finished version set to launch next year.

It’s planned that it’ll be designed for netbooks in its early stages, with plans to move it into the desktop world as well. Now, with me being a staunch supporter of all things Mac, you wouldn’t have thought I’d particularly welcome this news. But you’d be wrong. For one I’m very pleased that there’ll be another contender to hopefully bring down some of Microsoft’s dominance in the marketplace, and have the software arena back to being as fair game as possible. Maybe it will force Microsoft to stop being so sloppy in its developing and create a piece of software that isn’t bug-ridden and crash-happy.

The other reason is portability, when it comes to netbooks. As things stand right now, I wouldn’t dream of owning a netbook with Windows on it, as I totally dislike Windows and all it stands for. I do however like the functionality that some netbooks bring, size wise. So if there was the opportunity of having a low cost mini-laptop available that can run Google Chrome OS, I’d be tempted to have one as a secondary laptop.

Which leaves me to ask the questions – do you welcome this new addition to the OS market? Will you be running it yourself on your laptop/netbook? Do you think having a new contender is a good idea, or will it just fall on it’s face as a bit of a fad?

You decide….

Apple have recently released the latest version of Safari, version 4.0, which I have downloaded very happily! It was also announced recently that Mozilla are releasing the next update in their popular FireFox browser, version 3.5. It got me thinking, (albeit slightly), because of the fact that there are so many different web browsers out there, which do you feel are the most popular, what do you use most often, what’s your personal favourite, and do you ‘have to’ use certain browsers for different functions?

For me, Safari is my browser of choice, mainly because of it’s synching capability with MobileMe, so both my iMac and MacBook Pro are fully up to date with the same bookmarks. I also favour it because it’s the sleekest browser I’ve ever used, giving you, I think, the most screen real-estate. Also, as has been tested, Safari is now officially the world’s speediest browser, giving a highly efficient browsing experience.

However, there are a couple of sites I use very regularly that aren’t optimised for Safari, disabling things like text formatting buttons on forums etc, so I have to use Firefox instead. This naturally infuriates me, as even though I don’t hate Firefox by any means, it’s actually a really good browser in my opinion, for me it’s just not as good as Safari.

So with a multitude of options out there, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera and more – what do you use, and why?