Sunday July 4th 2010 was a notable day in the history of the world wide web, hundreds of iTunes users had their accounts hacked by a rogue Vietnamese developer, YouTube was hacked in a prank targeted against Justin Bieber and Wikipedia went down for a few hours due to a power outage. Twitter was ablaze with reports of these rogue activities, so at first it seemed an unhappy coincidence when our own web servers went down during the same afternoon.

Our concerns increased when we discovered that this was no accidental downtime, our servers had been hacked and critical operating system files deleted making a simple rebuild unlikely. Days later we realised how just how malicious the attack had been – the hacker first cracking an email account before systematically breaking into several web servers.

We’re still recovering data and rebuilding our web sites, but we’ve taken the opportunity to improve them whilst they’re down, moving to faster servers and tidying up a few aspects of their design. Bear with us during the next few days, there are still a few broken links and missing pages, so if you do spot something then please drop us an email at support@skiddmark.com.

The websites affected include skiddmark.com, roadmagazine.co.uk, fitchmedia.com and skiddmark’s community which we will continue to restore during the next week. We were able to quickly rebuild SkiddPlayer within the first 24 hours and rather than restoring the skiddmark community will be launching our new social community platform soon.

Keep an eye on our Twitter feed if you’d like to stay informed on progress.

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