BoD acting funny

Hey Scott,

You may want to check on the BoD website if you’re not doing so already. It’s directing to the index page and is allowing access to private usage stats.

​What?! Oh shit.

Yeah, so this morning at 6am I woke up to check on the morning posts and discovered that something had put the site into a weird maintenance mode I’ve never seen before. I logged into the web host and found a ransom note in the main directory, with the entire contents of the site zipped into an encrypted file, including the database files. They were asking for Bitcoin but fuck if I know about Bitcoin. Had they asked for Paypal, I could have easily paid them off. Luckily I have daily backups of the site and so do the fine people at phpwebhosting.com, so after much melting down on my part (only internally, thankfully for everyone at work) they were able to basically wipe the site clean back to June 13 and restore the database to a usable state again​. Unfortunately Vaultpress (my backup system) needs the site in working order before it can actually connect and back it up, so I had to co-ordinate both the webhost and them to get it back to yesterday’s states.

THIS IS WHY I HATE DOING WEBMASTER SHIT.

Anyway, it’s all working again, and I’m feeling much less stressed. Double thankfully, the Observer recap for tomorrow was one of the files that was saved, so it’ll be up tomorrow morning instead of this morning like I had wanted.

Anyway, ransomware sucks, and I think I found the culprit causing the issues, so I thank everyone for their patience and refreshing the site all day waiting for it to load again.