A few comments on what happened to the MND website – a perspective from our CEO
Well, that sucked.
It has been a long 132 hours. Let me start by saying that, on behalf of the entire MND team, I would like to apologize to our readers. We take the issue of website reliability and security very seriously and are disappointed and frustrated that this happened. I would also like to confirm that your personal information was never at risk. We are extremely grateful to those of you who wrote to us in support and encouragement in the last few days.
It all began early Wednesday evening. I had walked into town to pick up some MND Merch – a couple of onesies that we bought for some soon-to-be-born babies within our team. What better MND advertising than on a newborn baby, right? 🙂
As I walked home from the store, I checked my phone to see the latest published articles of the evening. Upon opening the site, I got one of those nasty-looking pop-ups, basically saying my phone was going to explode. I quickly shut down that window and convened an emergency leadership team call when I got home a few minutes later.
Our technical leader immediately engaged the cybersecurity team of our web hosting company, and they went to work on the problem right away. As we decided to try to get a few hours of sleep around 2 AM, it was looking like they had found the problem and would be fixing it over the next few hours. Over the course of the day on Thursday, on five different occasions, the web hosting company confidently told us the problem was resolved, only for it to appear again. Some users were back to normal, well, others still had problems. By Thursday evening, we knew we needed to pursue a Plan B and began researching what might be the best option.
On Friday morning, we hired a firm that specializes in cyber attacks and has a very good reputation. We quickly wired them money and they went to work. All day Friday, they were reviewing our site and, four separate times over a 15-hour period, declared that they had solved the problem – only for it to continue reappearing over and over again. As a result, we convened a 10 pm Friday night leadership call where we began to discuss more extreme potential solutions while still looking for other experts who could help us.
On Saturday morning, at 6 am, we decided to go with a much larger, much more sophisticated, and much more expensive solution. We hired an elite firm specializing in this specific type of cyber attack. Three wire transfers in 48 hours, but still no solution!
Thankfully, in the last couple of days, they were able to go much deeper into actually solving the problem and setting us up to be safer in the future. We also then hired a fourth company that has significant experience in bringing websites like ours back online safely to help us with that process and continue monitoring.
One of the key reasons for our decision to eliminate third-party advertising on the website earlier this year was that we identified it as a high-risk area for potential cyber attacks. I am glad that we made that decision, but we obviously need to do more – and will do more in a world where attacks are increasingly common and sophisticated.
The team at MND is passionate about being your best source for news and information about Mexico. Thank you for supporting us and you have our promise to do everything we can to keep our site safe from future attacks. I will be back with an additional update soon. In the meantime, there has been a ton of great content over these past few days, so please enjoy catching up on your reading! Thank you!
Travis Bembenek
