Some lessons about blog attacks in the spanish-language blogosphere · Global Voices
Jorge Gobbi

Spanish version here: Algunas enseñanzas sobre los ataques a blogs
In the last weeks there have been a series of quite similar attacks to popular blogs in Spanish. The series began at the immensely popular Chilean tech blog FayerWayer [ES], which not only was hacked, but also got all of its posts and comments deleted, and all that was left was a pretty sour manifesto against Leo Prieto [ES], the site's creator. The blog had been backed up a few weeks prior, so it was mostly the comments which got lost. The posts, in some cases, were manually recovered. Next was Mariano Amartino's Denken Uber [ES]. In this case – despite having all his posts deleted – nothing big happened, except for a few hours offline status, since his hosting provider automatically saves copies of the database and it only needed to restablish a copy. Finally, the most serious case was that of Cronicas Moviles [ES], a site mainly dedicated to publishing video interviews. In this case – because it was hosted in Blogger – there was no backup at all, and all of its published contents was lost.
Despite the similarities of these acts – accessing the blog's administration interface in an unauthorized way and deleting all of its posts – there's no clue that indicates they were done by the same person. But it's surprising to see the extreme cruelty of these people trying to ruin many years of work. At the same time, it displays a clear fact: keeping a blog is not an easy task, and it forces us to follow certain basic routines. Among them, to modify our password frequently, change the name of some folders of access to the administration interface, and particularly, make back ups of the database or posts we've published, in case we're using some free blog publication site. All of these things, of course, take time. And the worst thing is we have to use more of our (little) time to maintain our blogs than to write on them.