Readers,
We would like to address some recent issues that came up concerning the security of PalatePress.com. First, a huge thanks goes out to those who e-mailed us right away, and informed us of issues (editors@palatepress.com). Recently, the site was hacked, and all traffic that came from search engine crawlers was directed to rather spammy links. To put this in very simple terms, under the news section of Google for Palate Press, some very suspicious links (articles talking about gambling, drugs, adult activities, etc) showed to be coming from Palate Press, and more importantly, redirected from the Palate Press’ site. Action was taken immediately, and the redirects from the Palate Press site were disabled. However, search engines such as Google and Bing had not yet re-crawled the website. Palate Press requested that Google re-crawl the site, which was honored, and the spammy links no longer show up.
The good part about this situation is that no usernames, emails, or passwords were stolen; however, it is never a bad idea to change your passwords. Some general password tips go as follows:
- Do not use words, but if you must, replace some letters with numbers.
- Use capitals, lower case letters, and most importantly, special characters such as dashes, asterisks- anything that you can use shift and type out using the top row of your keyboard is fair game.
- Never use the same password on more than one site. If you need to, write them down- avoid using an online password manager, as servers can be hacked, but a stack of index cards cannot.
- Reset your passwords often, and do not reuse them.
While we know this isn’t the ideal way to spend a weekend, it is of upmost importance. While the security on the back end of Palate Press was already extremely high, this has been enhanced even further. Understandably (hopefully), we will not disclose any actions that have been taken on the back end to enhance security, as this would defeat the purpose.
Thank you for reading Palate Press.
Josh Honig, IT Manager