PTW

Apologies all, but I've had to disable the main PTW website, because it has been hacked.

I've sent a message to Les with a more detailed explanation, but essentially we have been running a very old version of Drupal, and this kind of thing was probably inevitable.

Updating to a newer version of the website might be a possibility, but it is 9 years old, so it certainly isn't going to be easy. Alternatively, it might be possible just to patch the problem, since I believe I know how they got in.

In any case, now might be a good time to take stock of what we want from a website. However, I'm sure as a club you would prefer the website to be up whilst you do this. I will do my best :-)

Thanks for letting us know Bill and thanks for your good work over the last 9 years. It's largely unsung but it is appreciated!

Our main website has now been fixed, and brought live again.

The hack went quite a bit further than I had figured, involving changes to the .htaccess and index.php files, which kept recreating the files I was deleting every time any page was viewed in a browser. There were also at least three extra backdoors, which they created just in case I found the previous two.

I've now hopefully removed all of their handiwork, and I've resorted to making nearly all of the files read-only, plus changing their ownership. Nobody can change them now.

Note to Ray: If you find anything that doesn't work, we probably need to loosen the website's strait jacket.

Bloomin' Russians.

Er, actually it was Indonesians this time. The Russians just interfere with elections and referendums.