Why is Olly's Site Down

[Davo36]

Every now and then I check out Olly Newland's site.

But I see it is unavailable: http://www.ollynewland.co.nz/



Does anyone know why? Might just be getting upgraded?

[drelly]

No reason to take a website offline just to upgrade it.

[Davo36]

Still down this morning.

[flyernzl]

Unpaid hosting bill?

[PTILoveYou]

Probably doing an upgrade or something.

[klauster]

When updating a website, you actually upload a new version to your hosting server somewhere on the Internet. During that short while you access a copy from this website (cached content), and even the Internet browser on your computer keeps copies from previous visits (if you don’t delete them).
If you have uploaded a website update and you want to see it, you have to refresh your browser, otherwise you still see the old content (each site has a “time to life” counter).
So, you would not care about updates, you will always see something. Or Not?

[OllyN]

The website has been hacked by an ex contractor.
The new web site is "www.newlandBurling.com ".
Anyone knowing how to "unhack" a website will receive a substantial reward.
Any emails only to: [B]"[email protected]"[/B] as other email addresses have been also compromised.
Olly

[grip]

The website has been hacked by an ex contractor.
The new web site is "NewlandBurling.com ".
Anyone knowing how to "unhack" a website will receive a substantial reward.
Any emails only to: "[email protected]" as other email addresses have been also compromised.
Olly

Olly what do you mean by "hacked"?
Did your contractor take the site down?

I see the domain is owned by Empower Leaders Publishing Limited.
The quickest way is to change hosts (by logging into discount domains which is the company holding your domain and changing name servers)
Then restore an old backup on the new host.

[Xav]

Wow that sucks.

An IT contractor? I assume you have laid a complaint with the police and contacted your web hosting company as a first step.

Edit: Just a quick addition to grip's post, the host for your .co.nz site is as grip has said, the host for your .com site appears to be Domain Agent instead.

[grip]

An IT contractor? I assume you have laid a complaint with the police and contacted your web hosting company as a first step.

This is a civil dispute and police will ask you to take legal action against the contractor.
You then file a claim in court, serve notice and try to take out an injunction against the contractor to stop him from "hacking" the site.
A month later, you're still hunting for the contractor to serve notice and your site is still down.

Quickest way to remedy is to change hosts (redirect name server), provided Olly has the login to discount domains.

Get the site up, then take legal action against contractor for loss suffered. Avid readers of Olly's blog will provide supporting affidavits outlining emotional anguish as a result of not reading his posts, and economic loss resulting from not having access to Olly's resources to guide our investment decisions.

[OllyN]

The data base has also been removed as was the back up .
Another substantial reward to anyone who knows how to recover these.
Please note new website and new email address above.
"www.newlandburling.com"
emails "[email protected]"

[Xav]

This is a civil dispute and police will ask you to take legal action against the contractor.

It's a criminal offence under section 249 of the Crimes Act. The police may or may not take action but I would suggest the complaint should be laid regardless.

Olly, when you say database do you just mean the website code or did you also have a database of contacts etc? If the problem is recreating the website you could try using a tool such as Warrick which uses internet search engine caches to try and recover it for you. Unfortunately Warrick is not accepting new requests over the website but you could have someone run the Linux version for you (there may also be similar tools you can use over the web).

[klauster]

Separate two aspects; legal and technical

Technical solution is to change the hosting service or simply change the access (user authentication) to that host for administration and to up/download data (new use name and password).
After deleting the compromised website, reload a backup. The tricky part is recovering the database (MySQL, SQL runtime or what ever) if there is no actual backup.
But the website could be up and running without database.

[drelly]

Hi Olly,

I've emailed you some advice on what to do.

cheers,
Dave

[klauster]

By the way, if your website has been compromised the cached copies on the Internet would also have the compromised code - you would need a clean startup and recovery.