I got a halloween surprise of my own yesterday when I sat down to write a new post for the month of October. When I tried to access the site, I was met with a directory listing page of my files instead of the homepage I’m used to seeing. I was a little concerned.

Since 2007, the site has been going strong without much of a real issue. But this month marks the first time the site was taken down in what appeared to be a security breach. While I do not have an exact time to when the breach occurred, I estimate the incident date to be between 25 October (the date of my last visit) and 30 October (when I discovered the breach).

Some files were missing, but thankfully, no data was severely compromised. However, to be on the safe side, I undertook a re-installation of key files to ensure a fully operational site upon restoration. Although I still do not have an assessment of the full extent of the damage, I believe that the site has been restored to full functionality at this point of time.

This, however, does not mean that an incident like this would not happen again. In light of this unfortunate incident, I’ve decided to deploy several security measures to curb potential take-down attempts and to closely monitor the site’s uptime. Hopefully, this will help prevent future security breaches.

UPDATE: It seems that this wasn’t a security breach after all. An email from technical support appears to confirm that it was a server-side issue.