Elk Co. Webiste and forum is back running at full speed!

[Teresa]

Thank you..
It was bad.....
Early Monday morning... our 3 sites suffered a major cyber-attack, causing severe damage to the site's server. Apparently the hacker gained entrance to the site thought a "back door" in the blog software used for articles. Everyone who tried to gain access was hit by a series of intense denial-of-service attacks.
By checking logs and the pattern of the damage, it's most likely one hacker was behind this attack..
Web servers are 'attacked' daily by robots and automated scripts, and most of them are stopped by our protection software. In this case, a hacker went in through a security hole and was able to manually delete specific files on one section of our server.

Our own backup routine was a lifesaver. Elk County Site is our smallest one and is made up of general local information and forum posts. But our other 2 sites are the largest firearms "community" sites on the Internet. Those 2 were the target of the attack and Howard got sucked into the vortex.. On those sites we have literally tens of hundreds of thousands of pages and different sections serving  advertisers, gun owners and the firearms industry. So Kjell has had to fully replicate the attack and close whatever security holes he could find.

He worked wonders..... He had to rebuild parts of the sites as when the hacker got in ..he damaged sections so that when the back up was installed.. the system was faulty in receiving it.. So the "guru of the internet" started drinking STRONG coffee and set to the task of rebuilding parts of the sites.

I actually didn't do much...All I did was keep him in cookies and take over all the other stuff so he could concentrate on the site..

Thanks again for all  the positive comments.