Friday, 27th December 2002, Sangeetham.com was hacked by some sadists who thought they were doing great service to the music community. What happened was nothing short of vandalism and irreparable damage to public property.
Yes, we consider Sangeetham as public property and any damage to its contents is definitely affecting only the public at large.
What happened?
Between 4.00 and 6.00 PM Indian Standard Time, the cowardly hacker has quietly gone about deleting the entire contents of the Kutchery, Raga, Season and Concert Review Talks of the Bulletin Board. The next step was to send four copies of the Sangeetham newsletter to all the registered members with pornographic messages. Fortunately Sriram was alerted with the newsletter messages and some preventive action was taken. Our server was also very helpful in immediately providing us with information about how the whole thing happened. Another helpful factor was that the only part affected was the bulletin board. The entire site was otherwise left untouched. Or did we manage to save what could have happened? I shudder to think about what really could have happened!
But this incident has helped us in learning the following lessons. One, is of course regular back ups. While the entire site is normally backed up almost three times, the bulletin board, being database driven has not really backed up. So we have actually lost all the data in the BB from the moment the new board became functional. Again we have managed to back up the old threads that resided in the earlier version of the BB and we should be able to have them online soon.
We have also managed to get specific information about where the hacking has originated and we shall be proceeding with the requisite legal action to try and locate and bring the persons responsible to book.
Finally I have the following to say. The community that has helped build this site is with us and we can count on their support in the future also. The overwhelming response via email from all of you has given us the will to face any such acts and carry on with what we are doing. I also think that someone actually saw Sangeetham as big enough to create so much damage. I think it is in a sense a reward for the work that we have been doing so far.
I appeal once again to anyone who has saved any of the threads in the Sangeetham Talk sections to please forward by email to Sriram at
[email protected] so that we can put them up at the earliest.
I once again thank everyone in the Sangeetham and the Carnatic Music community who has stood by us in this trying time.
Sanjay Subrahmanyan
indeed times change !!