Yes, I’m back. And in France again, yippeee…! But what was meant to be the second half of our holidays, became a nightmare because of a tiny and untypical mistake by yours truly. I clicked on a link in a fake email, and attracted a trojan viurs from Russia. Although I saw it immediately, computers are quicker than the human mind. So the virus planted bad code in thousands of programs in 11 of my 31 web sites.
I first spent 4 hours finding out WHAT had hit me and how to get rid of it. The actual virus. That was relatively easy (Google is your friend!). The next phase was, unfortunately, not.
So far 13 days have passed and I got my main websites cleaned an back up and running – mostly. But others are still out of order, and two of them have been totally destroyed by a program that was meant to clean them.
Today my Silver Cloud and EuropeRides sites are gone. The only thing I have rescued are the databases, so maybe I can still re-create them.
Some of the other sites are cleared, but not yet re-installed. And 3 are still waiting for download and cleaning.
Needless to say these past 2 weeks have been a major disaster for my private and business life. Backups don’t always help, and often simply are not possible.
Oh, and you can’t backup your life, spool back and start over again.
I doubt the guys who did this have an idea as to the amount of grief they cause in the world. On the same day more than 500.000 web sites were hit !!!
And IF they have, they are even bigger assholes than I know they are. There.
We’ll try and pick up our holidays again, even with 2 weeks of work to catch up with, and will report on some of our trips hopefully!
Keep the oily side down!
