I am in a terrible blue funk about the hacker who pulverized/destroyed one of my websites, yesterday. This website was for mine as well as several other authors' novels. It was a not a high-faluting commercial website, it did not receive thousands of hits a day, but it was hanging in there, ever since I launched it first in the year 2000, and provided an alternative online window to showcase our works.
I no longer had a guest book there due to spamming, also had to disable the forum due to the same plague, I could not even keep an email addy for our readers to contact us. But at least, we had the website....
I do have some back up files, tho not the latest. But more than that, I dread the time and effort required to rebuild. Of course this isn't the first time I have to deal with hackers. It has happened too many times before, the difference is how total the destruction! They rigged the site so completely that I could not even log on and clean up the mess, delete the horrific page they posted there, visible to all good-natured people who dropped in to check out our books, travelogues, poetry, and music, and Tech Support, besieged by the locust-like attack of these criminals on many other fronts, could not get back to me for many hours.
When my web counter showed that the hacker had returned to see whether we cleaned up his page, in a totally childish manner, like they would give a darn, I posted this at my site:
SHAME ON YOU,
MR. HACKER!
MAYAugust 22, 2006, U.S.A.: Newsflash to our friends and visitors from our Tech Support:
HACKER CONTEST GOING ON
13 NASA websites have been defaced this morning by a Brazilian crew called drwxr.
SEVERAL thousands SERVERS across the WORLD got hit in the past 5 days...
what they are doing is replacing all index pages in your site with their own hacked page and personal message...
THIS SITE, TOO, WAS HACKED INTO AND ALL FILES AND RESULTS OF YEARS OF HARD WORK, HAS BEEN DESTROYED.
HACKERS HAVE NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF!
THIS WAS A SMALL WEBSITE, SHOWCASING THE WORKS OF TALENTED AUTHORS, WHO WORK EXTREMELY HARD TO WRITE GOOD FICTION, AND WORK JUST AS HARD TO REACH THEIR AUDIENCE.
SHAME ON YOU,
MR. HACKER!
MAY THE HARDSHIP YOU CAUSED ME, RETURN TO YOU
1000 FOLD!
__________________________________________
I have visions of the hacker laughing his head off, and showing this post to his fellow criminals. It really is a downer of a feeling! They can come and violate people's websites with the same impunity a robber enters your house and defiles your privacy, your memories, and you go to the police and all you get is a philosophic shrug.
Well, yea, that's the world, that's human nature.
Cry me a river.
