You may have noticed the website has a new look. This wasn’t planned. During the ‘covid years’, lots of websites such as ours suffered an unprecedented level of nefarious activity from all kinds of people, from those looking to exploit websites to use in criminal activities to kids doing the digital equivalent of breaking in a making a mess. Unfortunately, we suffered from the latter and the mess is taking quite a bit of cleaning up.
Until everything is back to normal, this website might not be fully up to date. We will aim to push information out via our other channels, notably Facebook and the mailing list. But we appreciate not everyone uses Facebook so this is likely to be an inconvenience in the meantime.
To stop this happening again, we have upgraded our digital security and thankfully as everything was backed up we haven’t lost anything. It could have been much worse. I would ask for your patience and understanding until we get this all fixed. Thanks!
For those of a geeky nature…
Our website runs on WordPress and makes use of quite a few plugins to add functionality. It was one of these which wasn’t updated during lockdowns, leaving a vulnerability open. Lists of vulnerable websites were shared on the dark web and a coder somewhere wrote a script to exploit the vulnerability. The script itself was shared via various channels, especially YouTube, raising money for the coder. For those who paid and downloaded the script, running it against a vulnerable website would give them escalated privileges. As it was mostly bored kids doing this for ‘entertainment’, most didn’t know what to do once they had gained access to websites, other than the digital equivalent of kicking over the furniture and spilling drinks. But this does show the importance of keeping software patched and up to date.
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