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Original poster

That really wasn't well handled was it MNHQ?

5 replies

ASorcererIsAWizardSquared · 14/08/2015 11:37

Yes, this is a telling off.

Your communication over the Calm Down Jeffrey incident was atrocious.

I find it shocking that you can be sat there, posting to us that all is well and under control when we can see, in front of our very own eyes, that someone was hacking MNHQ posts and editing them, and also posting under posters names and editing other posts as well as deregging and banning other users who insulted them.

The response from you was seriously lacking, on top of your coquettish rubbish about not putting 50p in the meter when you went down over night.

Its not on.

You have a duty to your posters when these things are happening to keep us all informed, we're not stupid and we deserve to be treated with a little more respect. Not fobbed off with half truths and blatant lies.

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MNHQ

SarahMumsnet · 14/08/2015 13:41

Hey everyone,

Sorry some of you don't think we handled things well in terms of keeping you informed; we thought perhaps a summary of what happened when and what our thinking was might explain things a bit.

When the site first went down late on Tuesday evening, we assumed we'd be able to repel the denial of service attack quickly, hence the 50p in the meter remark on social media (we agree it looks flippant in retrospect, so apologies for that).

The site came back up briefly very late Tuesday night, but when it went back down again the severity of the attack became apparent, and tech spent the rest of the night and Wednesday morning working extremely hard to get us online again. We posted as soon as we could after the site was back up explaining that the denial of service attack had taken place.

It was then that we detected that our administrative functions had been hacked, at which point we obviously directed all our resources towards working out how this had happened and how to stop it (I posted on the thread to say as much in the early afternoon). As you'll no doubt appreciate, we really don't want to go into any more technical detail, but we're currently doing our best to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

The tricky thing from our point of view was that, as well as the fact that the situation changed at high speed over the course of about 24 hours, it was difficult to be explicit about what we thought was happening all the way through as we had to balance the need to keep you as informed as possible with the fact that everything we said would also be read by the hacker. Plus, as several people on the thread have said, we really weren't keen to give the hacker the publicity he so clearly craved. We really are sorry if you think that, in the event, we didn't get the balance quite right.

Meanwhile, if anyone's still having site problems of any sort, do drop us a line.

Thanks again for your patience,
MNHQ

MNHQ

SarahMumsnet · 14/08/2015 15:02

Thanks everyone.

Fflightattendant, on the question of data: we can say for certain that the hacker didn't get hold of anyone's passwords, as he claimed on Twitter, since we don't store them in plain text. We at MNHQ don't know what your passwords are; all we see in our system is something along the lines of @!£^$£(U(*&$£.

We can't guarantee with absolute certainty that the hacker didn't manage to look at some users' details, but as you know, we keep very few details on users, and he'd only have been able to look at as many as he could sit down and read in the time he had access to our administrative tools. We can say that he didn't gain access to the database itself; only to the screens we use on a day-to-day basis to manage the site.

We're really sorry we can't be more definitive than that. Unfortunately, it's just not possible to offer a 100% guarantee of online security; hackers will find ways round even the tightest of systems (the Pentagon confirmed last week, in fact, that they'd been successfully hit by a cyberattack) but we do our very best to protect our users, and be transparent about any breaches we find.

Really hope that helps clarify matters, insofar as we're able to clarify them, and thanks again

MNHQ

MNHQ

SarahMumsnet · 14/08/2015 15:30

Trending I fear is set to stay Maryz: we're at the point now where the word's entered the lexicon on social media sites, and we felt we needed to move with the times (I remember a similar wrench when people started calling them blogs instead of web logs ).

On the logging off issue - we thought we'd cracked this one but apologies if not. Could you let us know which device and browser you're using, and whether you're on the site or the app? Thanks Flowers

MNHQ

SarahMumsnet · 14/08/2015 15:37

badooby

Grin
MNHQ

RebeccaMumsnet · 14/08/2015 16:53

@usualsuspect333

Is it safe to go into customise now?

I need to go and untick a box but don't want to lose classic.

If you are in classic now and you go into customise, make sure classic stays checked and then uncheck the box you'd like unchecked and then hit save.

You should keep classic.

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