Down Time & Reduced Services Nov/Dec 2017
I apologise for the disruption to our website and some of its facilities. There are some technical and security issues to resolve, but I'll do my best to restore things as soon as possible.
Between 28th November and 5th December, the website was made unavailable. This was done deliberately for security reasons, while a possible hacker intrusion incident was investigated.
There's no evidence of any data being stolen, but the investigation revealed some security weaknesses in our system. These have now been partially fixed, but post-incident security scans indicate that there's more work to do in this area.
For this reason, I removed the writing groups directory and suspended the "100" competition. The privacy and security of your data is a major concern and I felt it best to err on the side of caution.
I'll be improving the website's security and endeavouring to get things back up and running as soon as possible.
Apologies once again for the disruption.
— Kevin Machin, December 2017.