Patrick Nielsen Hayden announced to Tor.com readers that the site was hacked, a post defaced with a threatening message, and a few other alterations made. Everything is now restored.
The break-in was most likely accomplished by means of a vulnerability in Joomla, our content-management system, which was first discussed in public on Tuesday and patched on the same day; in other words, the intruder took advantage of a very brief window of opportunity.
Boy, do I sympathize. One of the most frustrating things about blogging is this kind of attack. I haven’t fallen prey to a hacker, but the relentless spam is bad enough. Every day I delete dozens of bogus comments full of malicious links, a very boring “one-person-shooter” game. Waging technological war against a robot army is not the science fictional experience I want from this blog.
It helps to require a captcha be filled out. This is a version particularly well-suited for fans (which I once blogged about, of course.)