Curious why we were down yesterday? We came to work Monday morning to discover that all our home pages had been hacked by what appears to be a programmed attack originating from India. Although the attacker managed to cover his or her tracks relatively well, it appears that FTP was used to load malicious services onto our main Linux server. Because we couldn’t really be sure if there would be any residual hacks buried in the system, we pulled out boot drive and tossed it, put in a brand-new drive, formatted it raw, and installed Linux from fresh, sealed CD-ROMs. We also implemented a more aggressive series of intrusion detection and interdiction programs which will hopefully keep unwanted visitors at bay. Of course, this could have been much more than an inconvenience if we didn’t have backups. Remember: MAKE A BACKUP TODAY! — DG