It’s a common place thing online & periodically I see reference to it.
Last Sunday morning I made my morning stop at the ACDSee forums. Upon logging in, I saw the words – "you’ve been hacked". Joy …. not the way a Community Manager wants to start the day, week, or whatever!
One of my forum moderators from Germany was interacting with the hacker. My forum moderators are amazing people & I keep telling them that!
The end of the story is that one person created a lot of unnecessary work. The good news is that we didn’t lose any content. We’re presently running a beta in addition to our regular customer interaction. Our community is 17,000 strong & there was a minimum interruption of their services.
The experience made me realize a number of things. Weekend contact information is important to have. Communication needed to be made immediately, then during the recovery & finally on the impact to IT, my manager & eventually to the executive level.
Do you have a contingency plan in place for unexpected events? . I know that in the digiscrapping community a site went down & they used Facebook to disseminate information.
Connie:
It sounds like you got everything under control quickly . . . more power to you! It seems that some people just have TOO much time on their hands!
I feel your pain Connie. A couple of years back I got a 5:00am phone call from the CEO asking me if we’d changed to speaking Chinese.
I was immediately awake, and there it was…hacked by a Chinese activist group. Like you, I had a wonderful cadre of moderators, and was lucky to have a fresh backup for the database. The whole episode lasted less than an hour…but what an hour that was :>)