POP 014/ RESURRECTION!

Today’s Pop is David. He can also claim the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week too, having spent five days transfixed by an incredible real world internet tragedy while mired in hacked server purgatory. Be gentle with David. (He’s trying hard to rid his brain of dark mantras like “99.7 % uptime” and “secure backups”.)

 

 

 

 

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For all those who’ve been wondering what happened to THEPOP.COM this week, sorry, but you were far from alone (we’ve received like a billion emails). Along with many thousands of others we got our server completely wiped out last Sunday night. Oh yeah, and the backup too.

 

In a nutshell, what many internet business’ experienced this week was the on-line equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. To be more precise, someone had found a vulnerability in HyperVM – the software used to run a lot of servers – and decided to play God and issue a nice little erase command on the server network we happened to belong to.

 

On Sunday night the head developer and owner of the hacked software committed suicide. He’d played very loud rock music to his Indian neighbors for a couple of days before. By Monday the webhost had gone bust and many internet business’ reliant on daily e-commerce were also in serious trouble.

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THEREGISTER.CO.UK,

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THEREGISTER.CO.UK 2 and

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INQUISITR.COM. Total money lost due to a couple of quick keystrokes? Tough to guess, but we’re really talking Ronaldo transfer money here…

 

The stories in

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The Times of India and elsewhere kept us shaking our heads and got us seriously pondering the bigger future issues of cyber kidnapping, terrorism and attacks. Meanwhile the small, dedicated team at THEPOP.COM rebuilt the platform from scratch. Thank goodness our blog had only been up for a week or so (we could rebuild everything) and the main site we’ve developed this past six months was still safely in Beta mode.

 

This is perhaps not the best place to expand on dark future issues around servers but, if you ask us, issues like online credit card fraud, Ebay cons and email rackets will seem like a piss in the ocean when your city’s power grid is held ransom by a cyber gang (already happened in the US

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WASHINGTONPOST.COM)

 

Ah, well, we’re up and running again… fashion does love a good drama…

 

Can I go to bed now please?

 

 

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Published:
14.06.09 / 8am
Category:
POP OF THE DAY, SOCIAL
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