September 30, 2009 Smashing magazine site crashed! Individuals who have not been identified yet were caught snooping around smashing magazines main servers, Smashing magazines spokes person stated that they infiltrated tried to alter some html data but that’s all they managed to manipulate no other data was harmed. Smashing magazines site went down when they noticed that a single server was compromised this was the server and the site server that supports the popular Word Press blog.

Smashing magazine hasn’t given details of how long their site is going to be down, they have some problems on their hand as their site got severely backed up in only a couple of days. Smashing magazine doesn’t know why or who or what the attack was for or where it came from – the investigation is ongoing rumors have speculated across the web that it may be due to a faulty plug-in.
We’ve experienced are own set of security issue and had to shut down for major site for repairs. We only hope that the ever popular site Smashing magazine gets up and running again.

Until then I’m sure all the designers out there can find many repost of the popular blogs posts from smashing magazine. I wonder with such high profile web sites getting hacked, it made me think about security a little more even my own site. Some really popular blogging tools and CMS software offerings have a less than outstanding record on security. The problem is no doubt exacerbated by the vast installed base of software like Word Press and Joomla on the Web. Being so popular makes these packages a prime target for hackers. No one safe i guess when it comes to security.

Related articles:

• perl hacks: Building Web Sites with Perl (perlhacks.com)
• Open Source and Usability: Plone (tc.eserver.org)
• Building a website? How to choose the right CMS (entrepreneur.venturebeat.com)
• When Bad Things Happen to Good Content Management Systems (freelanceswitch.com)