Today's Outage -

[sharon sanders]

Thank you to Senior Administrator AnneZ and Mod Tech, who are in New Zealand, for monitoring the outage that started last night at approximately 10:30 pm EST and continued throughout today. After the initial outage where I was present and called the server company in California, AnneZ followed up with a phone call from her location to the United States.


Put simply - we were hacked.

Two key directories were removed and replaced with files. This caused the hard drive to corrupt and shut the server down. No one connected with FT management was responsible for this event.

This event is being investigated.


To make it clear what we are not:

We are not a commercial enterprise. We do not compete.

We are not a political site. We do not enrage.

We are not engaged in any controversial social debate. We do not incite.



What we are:

We are a participatory international public health web site. We are humanitarians.

We are engaging in the discovery, investigation, and dissemination of information about emerging diseases, social reactions, and possible treatments. We are embracing hope for the future of the world's vulnerable populations.

We are bringing together individuals from many countries in the effort to lessen morbidity and mortality. We are empowering the common man.

We are pioneers in this field on the internet. We are making a difference.




"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."

Martin Luther King, Jr.



We will not give up. We can not be dissuaded from our mission. We will succeed.


Every time we are hacked - we will fix it.




:yinyang:

 

[LMonty]

Re: Today's Outage -

Thanks to you all for your vigilence and hard work keeping us up and running.

 

[Cindie]

Re: Today's Outage -

It sure made me realize how much I depend on you all to keep me informed. It was scarey to not know what was happening in the world even for a day. As a computer tech I was sure you had been hacked and it infuriated me. Yes....you won for a day. You made the world less safe so you could win, but you won. Now go back in your parents basement and get online and brag about how good you are and leave FluTrackers alone. The people who run this site are wonderful people who won't give up, and in the end, despite you they will save the lives of many many people.

 

[tropical]

Re: Today's Outage -

"It was scarey to not know what was happening in the world even for a day."

Better became use to it - imagine what will happen if an severe nasty novel pandemic strike -
- we can forget continuous global internet public citizen communications for months ...

 

[gsgs]

Re: Today's Outage -

so FT was hacked because of its mission or just coincidentally,
someone wanted to place spam on FT ?

 

[tropical]

Re: Today's Outage -

Seems to me that this is a second time that the server shuted for a day, in a 2 months period.
If it will happen soon for another time, than we can extrapolate by mathematical induction that:
(if for 1, and if for 1+1, ..., than is for 1+n) this is not coincidentally...

 

[tygerkittn]

Re: Today's Outage -

It was FEAR. Someone with computer knowledge is scared of bird flu, and by hacking the site it made them less afraid. They have no control over diseases, but they can cause a computer glitch, so that made them feel "powerful" and less afraid of the disease. Transference.

 

[Siam]

Re: Today's Outage -

I am so glad it was taken care of so quickly, and thanks to all involved in this.