Our website was hacked into yesterday. The intruder(s) have modified many of the files on the server about 9 hours ago, which brought the site down and made it inaccessible. I made the site accessible again, and eliminated the security threat. Read more (click on the title of this story) for details.

Some intruders modified several files on www.stanmed.net on Wednesday February 22, at around 4 PM GMT. This had made the site inaccessible, until I discovered it around 1 AM GMT  on Thursday, February 23. As an immediate measure, I switched our beta site which is still under development to take place of the live site. The previously live site which got compromised is now deactivated.

 

All the subsites - batch88, stanley89, etc., are unaffected, and working normally.

 

What you are seeing now was the beta-test site of StanMed.net which is supposed to replace the live site at a later date after the addition of a lot more features. But due to this unexpected emergency, I had to switch over much earlier than anticipated. Some of the features of this site are hence still under development, and not all content has been migrated. Almost all user accounts have been migrated (about three weeks ago), except for new users who signed up in the past three weeks. Your old passwords should work. I will migrate these users who signed up in the past three weeks soon, hopefully before Sunday, February 26. If you are one of these new users, please do not sign up again with the same user id, and wait until Sunday.

 

The old forum posts were migrated three weeks ago, while the user accounts were migrated. Newer posts have not been migrated yet. The old articles from the old site have not been migrated. I will try to migrate them this weekend, and will hopefully do it based on how difficult it is.

 

I will resume development work on the future beta site of StanMed.net on a new test site, and not on this one. This site will be the production site, until the newer site with a lot more advanced features is built and tested. I am also investigating the cause of the website compromise to fix any security risks and make the site secure in the feature.

 

Please bear with us during these changes, and thanks for your continued co-operation and support. 

 

Senthil Kumar Nachimuthu,

StanMed.net Administrator and Webmaster

Elysee 94 - Class of 2000 Alumnus of SMC.