Just about two weeks ago, SoftSift was under seige by a hacker, called Mhrfl. It is definitely not something that is really proud to talk about, as it simply illustrate the vulnerability of site being insecure.

Luckily, the hack was discovered within 12 hours and the site was restored back to its original status. The full detail of what happened is covered by Al in SelfMadeMinds.

Honestly, it was completely a webmaster’s nightmare as it takes a lot of trouble to restore the website to its original state. One thing that all of us can learn from this situation is, always back-up your data, as frequent as possible. Another thing is, it always pay to get your site secured professionally, especially if you are running a huge traffic.

Why I highlighted that hacked site is very costly, is simply because there was a significant drop in the number of inbound traffic, particularly organic traffic from search engines; ever since the hack took place. Right now, I am unable to show you the screenshot, but when I manage to get the site sorted out, you will see the evidence that it is not cheap when your site is down.

For webmasters, or site owners, traffic simply means revenue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 2:11 am and is filed under Site News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.