September 13th, 2007 by Akede (from Joomla.org)

In August this year we had two very successful conferences and Joomla!Day's. First the Thai community welcomed Joomla! on the Thai Open Source Festival and on the weekend afterwards on the first Joomla!Day in Bangkok Thailand. After that the Joomla! team presented the latest Joomla! 1.5 news on the other side of the world at the Linux World Expo in San Francisco and down south in Brazil on the first Joomla!Day in South America. We like to thank everybody from the event teams for their help and their support to make those events a great success.  >> more

 This is terrible!  I admit I went and checked all my back ups after reading about this.  A catastrophe like this reminds us all how important it is to have a good back up of your website.

If you don't currently have a back up plan for your Joomla website, you better get on the ball.  We reccomend JoomlaCloner - backup and restore.  It will back up the database and all other files and put it into one nice little zip file.  As long as you have this file, you can get your site back up an running in less than an hour on any server.

 Here's an excerpt from Louis Landry's blog  at Joomla.org

...This morning Rob and I were sleeping in a hotel in Omaha, Nebraska on our way back to Rob's parents house for a couple of days before I head back home to New Orleans.  About 8am this morning both of our mobile phones started beeping at the same time with an alarming message, “Joomla.org hacked”.  Rob sprang to life and immediately logged in to talk with the guys that were up already assessing the situation.  Unfortunately for us, we had to be on the road today as we are on a pretty tight time schedule over the next couple of days.  The logs were pulled down and the sites restored.  As it turns out this was a mistake as we had not done a thorough enough evaluation of what had happened.    Read full story