The term “hacking” may be new to you unless you’re a computer geek. Hacking is the name to given to breaking into someone’s website by using malicious software. The hacker may just be trying to show how skilled he is at breaking through someone’s passwords or firewalls. But sometimes he means to do real harm to the website owner. We can’t be sure what motivated the hacker who trashed the shul website, this blog, on December 26. It is a lesson for all of us that computers are not completely fool proof and whenever you put something “out there” in cyberspace, it is vulnerable to attack.
My first hint that something was wrong actually came on December 26 when I started to get junk mail from our blog. Since I have software on the blog that filters filters out junk, I knew that something had stopped working. But it didn’t seem serious. I had family matters to attend to last week and decided I would look at it on the weekend. However, on Shabbos morning at shul, Joel informed me that the shul blog was “down”. This elevated my concern, and I began an investigation right after we finished Kiddush. Little did I know that I would be spending the rest of the day, New Year’s Eve, performing website maintenance. Continue reading