After a brief site outage this morning, we’re now back and better than ever!
What happened?
This morning, our web hoster informed us that their scan had picked up malicious code in our site and had quarantined the site for everyone’s safety. We were a bit shocked by this news because we keep everything about Meople’s Magazine up to date to prevent exactly this from happening. But we were not very shocked, because we’re all aware that a secure website doesn’t exist.
And then what?
Fortunately, some of us Meople people work in IT, so this wasn’t exactly our first rodeo. The first thing we did was what we considered the most important: make sure that none of you were directly affected. Good news, everyone! Automatic scan and manual verification show that none of the malicious code sent anything to our readers. No malware went out to you.
Next, we fixed the immediate problem and removed the malicious code. We identified two likely vectors through which the infection may have occurred and closed them. We added measures to make a recurrence of this sort of problem less likely, and to detect earlier if something does slip by. Then we lifted the quarantine and put Meople’s Magazine back online.
Everything looks good now. We were lucky that no data was lost and the problem was relatively easy to resolve. A big thank you goes to DomainFactory for having our back with their security scans. And now let’s not do this again in a hurry.