As many of you have noticed, our site was "hacked" yesterday, and all of the index pages in
all directories were replaced with a rant protesting US support of Israel. There are still
many such pages throughout the scotlandsoftware.com site, but I've also archived one
<a href="http://www.scotlandsoftware.com/blog/meta/hack_rant_index.htm">here</a>
for anyone who's interested.
Despite what the replacement page says, the existing "index.*"
files were not renamed and preserved; they were destroyed, in all directories.
The hack occurred at around 6pm GMT yesterday (Monday 9th June). As of 3pm today, we are <em>still</em>
waiting for our hosting provider (<a href="http://www.simply.com/">Simply.com</a>) to sort out
the mess and restore our site from backups. It seems that we weren't the only Simply-hosted site
to be affected, as the current item on their
<a href="http://www.simply.com/cgi-bin/status/status.cgi">Network Status page</a> indicates:
Server Zeus.Simply.Net - Update
Date: Tues June 10 05:57:27 BST 2003
Following an incident yesterday evening our technicians have been working through the night
to restore services for sites and email services on server Zeus.Simply.Net.
FTP & Mail is now functioning correctly however there may still be some websites which are
not displaying correctly. Our Technicians are working through these but if you are able to
reupload your index.html or index.htm file via FTP into your main httpdocs directory that
will restore your website sooner.
"Not displaying correctly" indeed.
Email is fine, but the web form is offline. If you need to get in touch and don't already have
an email address for me, either try AIM/iChat with "MadMcProgrammer" (if it's extremely urgent),
or leave a comment here (preferred). Products/articles pages are gone, but all downloads are fine.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks to those who emailed, either to check that we were aware of the problem or to offer some
words of sympathy and shared frustration! Needless to say, apologies to those who are offended by
the content of the replacement index-pages; it's nothing to do with us, and hopefully they'll be
gone very soon. More later.