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January 16, 2006
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Haxored! - Monday January 16, 2006 - by: Martin Felcher
That's right. It can happen to anybody. And when you're as <sarcasm>personable and likeable as we are here at Fugly.com</sarcasm>, it's astounding that it doesn't happen more often.

At some point over the last 5 years or so, our server was hacked. It was broken into. "Infiltrated', 'haxored!', 'pown3d', whatever you want to call it.

Somebody, somewhere manage to do something so that it redirected a portion of our search engine traffic to porn sites and the worst thing about it is, we have no idea how long it had been going on.

What we found was this: If you went to a search engine, Google for example, and searched on "fugly", more than likely a link to our site would be one of the first to come up.

If you click that link on the search engine results page, you come back to this site. At least now you do anyway. At least now you Should, anyway, but for God knows how long, you had about a 50/50 shot of either coming to this site, or winding up on some porn site some place, getting bombarded with spam and things that tried to install themselves on your computer and basically render it useless.

You might have even ended up on a site that looks very much like this one, only with different advertisements on it.

We really don't know the full extent of it and we're only now getting things back on track.

We moved everything off of our old server, and away from our old hosting company to a new one that is a mere 15 minute drive from the palatial offices of Fugly Corp in beautiful downtown Fulton, Maryland.

So far, we haven't seen a real difference in the amount of people that are coming to the site, and if you look at our Alexa ranking details, it resembles seismology readings at Mount Vesuvius.

Translation: it's all over the goddamn place and we still have no idea why.

We're hoping that it's just some kind of post-traumatic hack disorder, or some sort of reverberation that happens when you're the victim of something like this for as long as we were.

In any case, to make matters worse, I am what some might consider to be .I don't know. What's the best word to describe it? Maybe. "Insane". I think that's the best choice of words.

I worry a lot. I am either one of those very thorough types of people who don't like to leave unanswered questions after the discovery of a problem or, I some times imagine that things are much larger problems than they actually are.

One of those two things, or some combination of them both is true. In any event, it drives other people crazy. Just ask the lovely Crystal at our (hopefully still friends with) advertising agency who I telephoned and emailed incessantly, demanding that she answer questions about why a specific banner ad that was appearing on the site seemed to refresh itself to a sponsor's link instead of the user having to click on it?

I'm no longer working with that particular advertising representative in the same capacity I was a week ago and it's not entirely my choice, if you get my drift.

Anyway, the reason I'm even telling you all this is because I want to explain why it's taking so long to get things back together.

Part of this portion of my personality causes me to be very cautious and so I have not replaced any part of the site in the last month with any script or program that I didn't write or that someone I know personally and who is in driving distance didn't write.

Anyway, things are still a little screwy around here.

More so than usual.

I'm working on the news portion of the site now, and while I was sifting through the drivel, I ran across this little ditty from five years ago today.

When I found it I thought two things. One, "ahh such potential I had". The other, "ahh, why in the hell am I still doing this after five long miserable years?"

Anyway, take a look. Just like everything else on this site, It's stupid and sophomoric but the picture cracks me up every time I look at it. I even got an email from the person in the picture a long time ago that I'll probably now go try to dig up and read.

I'm not black but, like a lot of other dumb crackers, I wish I was, so don't email me and give me a hard time either. Learn how to take a joke.

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