Recently when I was visiting a popular Vancouver acting site, Vancouver Actor’s Guide, I decided to visit the forum to read some messages if there was anything big happening around here as many people like to call it Hollywood north here. While browsing the forum, all of a sudden every page was redirected to a page stating that the forum had been hacked.
The hacker left his name marked all over the forum and so out of curiosity I typed it in a search engine and was I ever surprised. It looked like there were hundreds of sites that used an older version of phpBB, which is popular free forum software, and was targeted by the hacker. While seeing other sites that were hacked, in some of them there was a message left for the owners that if they wanted to recover their forum data, they could negotiate with the hacker.
At times like this it is sure a big reminder to always have a backup of your data and important information. If these sites were large businesses it would of sure been an expensive ordeal to recover from.