I make my living with computers, so it's all right for me to hate them sometimes, okay? Last weekend, probably Sunday night, somebody hacked our servers and took our websites down with a worm. It couldn't have been easy. We're in a professional hosting environment with all the latest security measures in place, and we don't use email servers, or allow any posting by unauthorized people

Fortunately, I had current backups. To make sure we had eliminated any of the threat, we rebuilt two of our servers. It's never so simple as reloading the software, then reloading the data. Over the course of several years, there's a bunch of customized software and settings that goes into place. We have client logins, server SSL certificates, special dll's to perform certain tasks and who knows what else. Sometimes we don't catch it all until a customer complains about some feature not working. I know, I know, we should know and keep up with all of that stuff, but you try it and let me know how to never let anything slip through the crack.

We got the clients all back up within a day. Some of our sites still aren't up. Some of them won't go back up. It's amazing what you start purging when you have to take a fresh look at everything you have. We're doing some rewriting, updating and consolidationg. It's all for the best, but those terrorist interruptions sure get me down sometimes.

On the bright side, we've had an incredible long period of time without any significant server interruption and even this one was only a minor glitch as far as most of our customers were concerned. It just took hours of my time I didn't have to spare. Oh, well. The cost doing business, they say. That's why it's Friday night late and I'm working while the rest of the family is playing.