Last week was hell for me. One of my website projects had been dealt with a hacker’s hand. That was our suspicion, though unfounded yet till today. I was so devastated that it took me a week later, that is today, to write about it.
One of my web researchers noticed something wrong with the site while he was updating entries one day. He called my attention to it, and we later found out that many of the already added entries were missing.
The missing files were alarming because there were many. These were content that were researched from the field for almost a year! And while we spoke, more files appeared to be deleted one by one.
Panicky, I called on my programmer and told him about what was happening. True enough, something was really really wrong with the site. Many of the parent categories were removed. Someone was relocating entries the wrong way, and so the data had been jumbled.
Worse, even the missing files could not be found in the database!
My initial reaction was to email all researchers and tell them to save their raw photos and data in CDs and mail the material to me. As Peter’s Principle would have it, one of the researchers claimed that she had deleted all the photos from her PC. Her reason: nothing! (I should investigate this further, because her last login to the site was the day before it happened. But this is over-reading of the situation already.)
What to do, but to hang in the hope that the programmer had diligently created a backup regularly. Well, the programmer did have a back up but it was not updated. The last backup was done in January 2009. That means the latest and most recent update on the site was not saved.
Well, a two-month update of content is a lot already but it was better than nothing at all. I thought everything would go smoothly from then on. I was wrong.
As we were trying to restore the data, there was permission problem. Even the researcher could not upload new data for of the same reason. I can only cry!
Till today, the missing files are not fully restored, and we are still battling with permission issues and other weirdness.
It is really sad because the project is content-based. It takes months to build it, and it costs as much. Reworking bad entries is bad enough, how much more is restoring missing files.
Whoever did this, D*** YOU!
