System status at HISTORIC CITY NEWS in St Augustine

This weekend, one account on our hosting system became the target of a denial of service attack from a group in Southeast Asia. After employing brute force techniques, the computerized script apparently cracked a minor password that is used for maintenance on our backend.

So you will know, and because we have blocked it from use in our system in perpetuity, the password was “n_r?udqCFW^6UT,+.{“. We don’t use words like “password” or “secret123” around our company. The passwords are changed regularly (twice weekly) and this one had been changed last on July 30, 2013.

The machine that did the damage to our server was connected through an Internet Service Provider in Vietnam. We forwarded all the technical details of the attack to the Electronic Crimes Task Forces and Working Groups of the Secret Service. The Department of Justice can only do so much and in the meantime, we are focused on the arduous task of rebuilding the best system we can within our budget.

Without going into all the gory details, we are hoping for most of our recoverable capacity sto be functional by the end of this weekend. The website at HistoricCity.com is about 75% back to normal today. Mail is a little flakey, but our Facebook at http://facebook.com/staugustinenews and twitter feed at http://twitter.com/historiccity is still brisk.

Thanks to the hundreds of calls and e-mails from loyal readers, we are focused on our recovery day by day. Prayers help. We know we can’t recover an extensive photo library that took fifteen years to build, but tens of thousands of news articles are preserved, and we are marching forward. We’ll keep you posted between now and Friday.