Hacked.
Just a few minutes past midnight, early Sunday morning, The New Civil Rights Movement was hacked. If you tried to access the site, you most likely got a malware warning that looked rather ugly and scary. (If you are still seeing that rather ugly and scary message, please know that it takes Google up to a day to rescan our site to ensure it is “clean,” and the warning should be removed very shortly.)Â Unfortunately, this warning was correct – the hackers installed malware onto our site in a concerted effort to take the site offline.
Fortunately, after almost 48 hours, a great deal of work, and a fair amount of money, The New Civil Rights Movement is back up and running. More importantly, we are clean and safe, and have taken additional steps — on top of the substantial security precautions we already had in place — to secure the site.
In addition to the apology I feel I owe our readers for not being here for you — despite the fact that we were the victims of a malicious and repeated hacking attack — I want to thank all our friends for your emails and DMs expressing concern and support. In the midst of a very frustrating two days, it was comforting and sustaining to know that we were missed, and that you were concerned for us. I cannot express how valuable those messages of concern were as we worked through this.
I wish we could go after the hackers who did this, but I’m told it was an automated attack from hackers in Russia, and, sadly, there’s no legal recourse we can take, despite being violated.
I wish I could definitely say why we were hacked, but the simple truth of the matter is we don’t know, and never will. And as a news site we have an obligation to be as accurate in all our reporting, so we’ll leave the speculation to others.
I do want to thank you for your patience, and promise you we’re back and here to stay for good.
I also want to take this opportunity to let you know that if you have any thoughts, feedback, issues, ideas, concerns, suggestions about the site or what we are doing here, I hope you’ll take a moment to share them with us. Feedback — positive and negative — is always helpful, and welcome.
My sincere thanks.
David
David Badash
founder and editor,
The New Civil Rights Movement
newcivilrightsmovement@gmail.com