On the afternoon of November 7, our site CatSynth.com suffered a major cyber-attack!
Everything was erased, all of CatSynth, my professional music website, the popular Mondrian Machine. Everything.
It is possible I can coax my service provider to restore things from a backup. Meanwhile, I have an older full-site backup, and I have recovered all the text and comments through Friday. So hopefully I will be able to restore the site with a few days to a week.
I have also been going over the logs (which were intact after the attack), and I have pieced together exactly when they got in, and to a certain degree, what they did. I would rather not go into technical details, but I can see a script being run, and after that all webpage access starting to fail with “404 not found.” I also found a piece of assembly code left behind. It looks like that was only for clean-up purposes after the deed was done.
As far as I can tell, the only thing done was getting in and erasing the site. There was no evidence that they used their access to send emails or attack other sites, or steal information. They just wanted to destroy the site. I can’t say whether it was a random act of senseless violence – there are people who just attack random sites for fun or bravado. But the timing and fact that all they did was destroy the site suggests it could have been deliberate. Possibly even political. We at CatSynth were outspoken in our support for certain people and issues, but in a mild low-key sort of way. But if an angry person was going through hundreds of sites looking for a vulnerability, we could have just been an easy target.
Comments
19 responses to “CatSynth.com attacked!”
That’s terrible! I hope you can get some of your content back from your service provider!
I am so, so sorry. Mean people suck!
That is horrible. What a mean thing to do. Losing everything. Hope you can recover your site.
That is certainly mean and malicious. We are sorry someone did that to you. We hope you will be able to recover most if not all of it, but it’s terrible you have to do it at all.
I’m sorry that your site got hacked, but who could do that? Your site is one of the coolest I know(knew), or it was?
Poop on them!
I think that is horrible that anyone would do that. I hope that you are able to get everything back and running.
It is very mean of whoever did this. Totally uncalled for. Catsynth is mainly a kitty/music site, with stats and pictures, etc. thrown in for good measure. I enjoy going there so much
All the work that was done…I’m so sorry. Will miss catsynth – until it comes back… Huggles
we are so sorry thus happened to you.
we are glad we found you tho we were worried when we could not find the cathynth hq… hugs to you all
This is most distressing news 🙁
I cannot imagine why people would do that kind of thing.
May they be infested with fleas!!!
Purrs Mickey
Oh my goodness!! We hope you can find it all and put it back together!! Poop on them!!
Your FL furiends,
What a rotten thing for someone to do. There really are some awful people about. We hope you can recover what has been erased.
Whicky Wuudler
Oh, wow. We’re hoping you didn’t lose too much from this. There are some mean people out there who do things like that for some perverted sort of fun.
You should be able to get a backup restored from your service provider, we would think. (the ISP probably should have provided security to keep this from happening in the first place, for that matter)
That’s not good at all! I’m sorry to hear what happened. It’s a constant reminder that there are some pretty nasty people out there who like messing with others just for fun! 🙁
This is terrible. I hope you can get the old site up and running soon. Such people should be prosecuted!
This is horrible!!!! Awful awful people!!! Karl at The Cat Realm) uses Teleport Pro to back up the blog offline – and he just realized that the last back-up was in March of this year….. so he will have to back up again right away!
We are so sorry…. what a terrible feeling for you – we send purrs!!!!
We actually came by to thank you for visiting our peace globe.
Karl and Ruis
hope you can get it sorted out, where else can we get our cat and synth fix?
So very sorry to learn that CatSynth was the victim of such a mean attack. Best of luck in getting everything restored. It would be even better if you could track down the perpetrators and expose them for the mean-spirited jerks that they are.
Look after yourself and Luna.
How sad. I came here looking for your peace globe because you signed the Mr. Linky at my site. I am so sorry this happened to you. BAD GUYS!!!
Peace to you and yours,
Mimi