Ignite got burned…but we rise yet again!

Courtesy of Matthew Petro's Dailybooth

Sometimes crap just hits the fan. That’s exactly what happened yesterday.

Yesterday morning, the deadline day for submissions for Ignite Phoenix 7, our website was hacked and a pretty vicious piece of malware was installed. Go figure.

We think it was probably some form of the pharma attack that has been making the rounds on WordPress sites, but can’t say for sure. Either way, the script replicated itself across every PHP file on our site and made fixing the issue rather complicated. Instead of simply removing it, we basically had to rebuild the site from scratch. Joy…

So our little hodge podge of a web team including Matthew Petro, Chuck Reynolds, Jeff Moriarty and your truly set to work on figuring out how to fix it. After a day or so of work, voila…Site is back up.

We made some significant changes to ensure this doesn’t happen again, but there is no permanent fix for the pharma attack at this point. We have done everything we know to mitigate it happening in the future, but we are keeping our fingers crossed.

The site went down at pretty much the worst time it could have as submission deadline days are usually a pretty heavy traffic day for us. We worked with Innovate Phoenix to throw up a submission page so people could keep submitting and also decided to extend the deadline for submissions until today at 5pm. So if you didn’t get the chance to submit yesterday, go make it happen now.