Today has been a tough day if you are a staff member at our Church.

They’ve had no email and no website all day – in fact since sometime late last night UK time as I understand it. The reason is sort of unimportant but because I’m a techy and I love to know the why I will breifly detail what I know this far.

It would appear that one of our hosters support techs was connected from home doing work and his / her PC was infected with a virus / trojan that grabbed their access details. It’s a short step from there to actually logging in and causing the havoc that was caused – which appeared to have been a systematic and large scale deletion of data / accounts on hosted servers starting at A and finishing at D before they were halted.

All in all it shouldn’t have happened but it did. For my part the aspect that interests me more is in how the hoster approached the problem.

- They’ve be open and upfront about it.

- They’ve been polite and responsive throughout the incident.

- Despite fighting the fire they’ve done their best to maintain service to all.

I’ve been with hosters who hardly give you the time of day let alone respond as timely as they can whilst also trying to get everybody’s data back online.  In fact, as I type (nearly a day later) the church’s data is one that is still affected. It would appear that 90% of users have their data / servers / email back but we’re one of the unlucky ones.

For sure they need to learn lessons and the church can also learn at the same time.

The hoster needs to ensure techs at home can’t be compromised again – I have ideas about this that would cost the business more money but it isn’t my business and I’m not a paid consultant for them so … as for the church we need to consider how essential email and the website are. My personal belief is that neither are that essential to day to day running of most businesses – there are some exceptions but we aren’t one. However I’m not there to make policy or dictate my beliefs but to help the church implement and plan for what they want.

At the moment I’d say the website is an easy one for us to not worry about. So long as we do regular backups and monitor it then all should be fine as it isn’t a vital business tool. That may change. The need to have email is another one that I don’t see as important, but if the church feels different then I’m happy to investigate possible options.

As I say lessons to be learned all round but kudos to the hoster for maintaining professionalism on what has been a very tough 24hrs.