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Sometime yesterday, Friday, September 4th, one of the sites hosted on the same server as TDC got hacked. This was part of what appears to be a series of attacks on WordPress sites that have occurred over the past several days (sites which have not been upgraded are apparently much more vulnerable; TDC was upgraded two weeks ago, the site that was hacked had not been upgraded).

In an effort to restore that site, our host organization offered to do a server restore back to August 31st. What they failed to explain to us is that the restore would affect all the sites hosted on that server, not just the site that had been hacked. So, what we’ve wound up with is a situation where the restore has resulted in many more problems that the original hack. Par for the course in IT, as we are told.

We will be able to manually restore all the posts and media that has now been lost from the past few days, but, unfortunately, it is not likely that we will be able to restore the comments.

The good news is that all of the new registrations, up until about 5:00 p.m. last evening, had been exported by the apparently prescient Marlie7. So if any of you have registered in order to be on the list for upcoming announcements about special offers and events, rest assured that you will be included. Also, rest assured that no information from the database of TDC has been compromised in any way.

Our apologies for the inconvenience of lost commentary — no one is more upset about that than we are. And we have also spoken directly with supervisors at the hosting organization to make sure they amend their customer service procedures so that it is clear to account holders what a full server restore actually entails.

Please expect re-posts of the articles which have been lost due to this incident, and please continue to comment and participate with confidence. We are on the case!

— the staff of The David Chronicles