My deepest apologies to those who tried to access this hacked San Diego real estate blog earlier in the week.
We are just now starting to recover from an attack that has left me stunned.
We were viciously attacked late Sunday night by unknown entities, who tried to destroy everything ever written on both San Diego Previews and Luxury Home Digest. It appears about 18 other real estate blogs throughout the country suffered the same fate. Thanks to the collective genius and caffein-fed 40-hour work stretches, the real estate blogging gurus at the Real Estate Tomato were able to revive us all back to some semblance of normality.
Glitches still remain: I still can’t load new photos into this Word Press blog and comments from readers have wrong dates. Those issues will be more easily resolved than my own nagging questions:
Why would someone or some group or anyone want to wreak such senseless damage on others? We have no account numbers or other sensitive information on these real estate blogs that could be of value to anyone; this is a case of wanton and heartless destruction.
I also can’t help but wonder why a home burglary would somehow be more comforting than this attack.
The answer might be that I can defend myself against a home burglary: I can install alarms, locking gates and buy a Pit Bull or two. I can also call the police, file an insurance claim–or move across town. That is a problem with obvious solutions.
How does one protect against online invasions? We install firewalls, we keep our virus protections up to date and stay away from suspicious sites. But what about other online vulnerabilities, or the evil intent of hackers?
I have spoken with some who were affected by this week’s attack. Clients were lost and some went elsewhere to search for properties. We received calls about the site being down–from some surely wondering if we were still in the San Diego real estate business.
This was an attack not only on real estate blog sites, but also on reputations, livelihoods and peace of mind.
Update: I can now load photos onto this limping San Diego real estate blog, but have discovered that all the back end stuff was also deleted and/or destroyed. In between the tedious hours spent helping to rebuild this site, I try to imagine fitting punishments for the hacker(s)–like banning them from computers for the next 50 years, or strapping a keyboard to their foreheads life or forcing them to hit the delete button on every piece of work they have ever created.
Grrrr!
Note: We eventually discovered who the culprits were who destroyed countless hours of work. We recovered. They did not.