Unknowncountry.com was hacked this morning. The site was restored within half an hour. The hack did not involve any viruses, etc., but rather a manual entry into the site’s back end and a small, almost unnoticeable change in a string of code. Our webmaster, James Beeson, managed to fix it even though he was for the most part locked out of the site by an associated exploit.
No personal information was compromised. Because Unknowncountry is a target for hackers, we do not keep your credit card information on the site. That is kept with our merchant bank on a PCI-compliant secure server. In our 20+ years of operation, we have never lost anybody’s credit card data or personal information.
In addition, Unknowncountry.com has extensive back-end security that prevents things like web exploits being run on the site. This is why the attack was not more serious.
Why did it happen today in particular? We’re not sure, although this week’s Dreamland contains some very sensitive information that has not been aired publicly before.
Subscribers, to watch the subscriber version of the video, first log in then click on Dreamland Subscriber-Only Video Podcast link.