Thursday, April 05, 2007

Malicious and Random Destruction

I am one of the moderators at Wild Poetry Forum. It's my poetry 'home' so to speak. So earlier this week, when we discovered that hackers had attacked the site with malicious code causing corruption of files and scrambling of posts, I was angry. It was like coming home and finding muddy footprints in your living room, and your stuff rifled through.

I have no idea *why* someone would want to cause damage to a poetry forum. It's not as if there is big money in poetry. It's not as if all the poets on the board are advocating some radical idea. (Oh, wait--it's poetry--very sub-verse-ive.)

In the end, it was not a major catastrophe, only a huge annoyance as the board admins spent *hours* tracking down the problem and restoring the board. Hair was torn out and sleep was lost, but no (I hope) lasting damage done.

Today I read a post on Absolute Write that the writing resource 'Preditors and Editors' was hacked as well, causing them to lose a huge amount of collected wisdom for writers. I hope and pray they are able to recover from this and move forward. I don't know, but I wonder if these are related incidents. I'm not *so* paranoid that I think some person is targeting writing sites, but there may be some virus that message boards are vulnerable to.

Watch your back, writers. It's a dangerous place out there.

If you post on the net, BACK UP YOUR WORK.

OK, I'll say it again.

BACK
UP
YOUR
WORK

Stupid people are everywhere and someone thought it would be funny to piss in our morning coffee. (metaphorically, of course)

If any of you reading this host a board and have had trouble recently, please leave a comment or email me.

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