As many of you know, recently the HB HairTalk forums were hacked by spammers who basically shut the forums down for 24 hours due to posting many thousands of spam posts including links to everything from porn to products sales.
There were also many outside links to other sites which were inappropriate.
Since that attack, which the HB Admin team worked around the clock to overcome and recover from, we have implemented a very strict policy about monitoring and policing the boards.
Whereas before we tried to be a little bit relaxed about our administration, we are now very strict and will immediately remove any inappropriate links to outside sites, posts which may look innocent, but appear to be soliciting others in some manner or just posted in the wrong place.
We are also listening closely to any reports of inappropriate posts and/or links and removing them immediately. Thank you for helping us keep the boards scrubbed clean.
Finally, we have new HairTalk Forum software up on test servers and are testing it with the hope of migrating to the new software in April or May of 2013. We are moving very slowly because I do not want to lose all of our legacy posts or impact any of the long term visitors in any way.
We will of course continue to support our Celebrity Hair Talk board as our primary focus and will keep the most popular forums, but will be considering closing some of the ghost forums. We are evaluating each one individually and evaluating lurkers or other traffic.
Thanks again for your support and patience as well as helping us keep the forum free of inappropriate outside links and/or spam. Karen Shelton2013-03-22 23:24:49
Hi Karen,
Thanks for all your efforts to make the site safe again. After reading some of your previous posts about hackers I was a bit unsure about visiting this site in case it was unsafe for my computer but it looks like you guys are on the right track.
These hackers really need to find something better to do with their time.Ericachristina2013-03-25 18:46:09
Hi Erica, Since hacking is on the rise all across the web and even big sites like banks & the news media, we have made some new investments in monitoring software which alerts us the second there is a potential threat.
After the last attacks we upgraded to a different more technologically advanced Co-Lo facility here in Dallas which is known for their work on dealing with attacks and virus detection as well as layered firewall protection. We also added several tools to purge any suspected attacks and for constant monitoring.
Trust me, I've dedicated over 15 years of my life to Hairboutique.com. I'm not going down without a fight and we take the safety of our visitors as our #1 priority.
My own bank - a well-known International bank - got hacked 3x in one week where I couldn't access any of my accounts for 24 hours. I shudder to think how many people had problems because of that hack.
Thanks for expressing your concerns. I appreciate that you are back.
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