We believe that the STC India portal was hacked recently and there were a couple of downtimes since the last weekend. While the downtime on Saturday (3rd April) lasted about 45 minutes, yesterday’s downtime prolonged to about 20 hours. As today was a working day for most of us, we could not reduce the downtime by resolving the issue sooner.

We regret any inconvenience that may have caused the users.

The hackers had introduced malware code into some of the HTM/HTML/FLASH files that belonged to the older STC India portal. To prevent the spread of malicious content on the users’ local computers, the STC India portal was taken offline.

Today, before getting the portal back online, we’ve removed all the content from the older portal and verified the portal’s safety using several systems, including Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostics page, Norton Safe Web, Dasient Web Anti-Malware solutions, Unmask Parasites, and others.

Please be assured that the STC India portal is now completely safe and we’ll continue to keep an eye on suspicious activities.

To prevent further downtimes, we had the option of removing just the known infected files. However, we chose to remove the complete set of files because it was impossible to review all the files (thousands of them!) for suspicious code. Unfortunately, the bigger impact is that we no longer have access to some important information, such as the presentation files of the previous annual conferences, pre-Aug-2009 editions of Indus, and so on.

As some of you are aware, we were trying to move the content of the older portal to the new portal from February. You may also recall Michelle’s call for Team Members and Project Managers for the Content Migration Project. With the recent security incidents, we’re assigning a higher priority and focus on the project. We hope you understand and support our decision to choose safety over content availability and bear with us.

We’re working to migrate the old content to the new portal. Stay tuned for more updates on the project. Thanks!

For a detailed problem statement, symptoms, causes, fixes, and preventive measures, visit http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/index.php/kb/article/570.