Compensation For Lost Revenues

As you probably already noticed, the Malware Issues that we experienced four days ago are completely behind us. Before we get to the promised compensation, here’s a little summary of what happened, what we did and what we’re doing and will be doing to prevent such events in the future.

The Attack

Though we initially assumed the malware sneaked through one of the advertising networks we work with, it turns out this wasn’t the case and that our own ad server was hacked using an exploit in the ad serving software that we use. What made it so hard to identify was the fact that most of the ads that were “taken over” were ads of that specific advertising network we initially suspected. Once we realized this, we immediately neutralized the hack, removed it from the server and made the necessary technical configurations in order to prevent a possibility of this hack to ever happen again.

In the meantime, we were communicating with Google about the websites blockage issue, and as you all know, our websites were gradually white-listed again until the entire content network came back to a 100% functioning condition.

This is the first time that one of our servers was hacked, and that’s after we’ve been in this business for more than four years now. As terrible as this experience is, we did gain a lot from the experience by learning how to be alert to these kinds of attacks, how to deal with them efficiently and how to prevent them in the future. Everything we’ve learned is currently being implemented through all of our systems.

Can such an attack still occur in the future? The exact same one – no. We’re defended from it now. Another type of attack using another type of exploit in any of our systems? Yes, it can happen. Sadly, the internet is an open space that enables evil entities to operate. No one, not even the mighty Google, not The New York Times and not even the US government are fully protected.

Will we do everything we can in order to prevent any further attacks in the future? YES!

Reputation

Some of you were worried about damage to your and Triond’s reputation and the time it takes to rebuild it. If any Triond user’s reputation was hurt we are truly sorry and would like to apologize. However, there is nothing we can do to cure that or turn the wheel back.

However, we do hope most of you understand that very little reputation damage was done,  if any at all. In the past few days, since the attack, traffic levels are back to what they were before it — and even higher. We’re sure it reflects in your stats as well. This means that your readers are back.

Compensation

One thing for sure — you did lose money during the attack, and as promised, you were compensated.

Since we had no way of knowing what your income might have been — how many page views you would have had and how much ad revenue they would have generated – we decided to make an estimation based on your average earnings.

The websites blockage lasted in some volume for about 1.5 days. To be on the safe side we decided to compensate you for two whole days. We calculated your “daily” income as your average income from September 1st through September 6th, and granted you twice that amount as a compensation. The compensation is already reflected on your Dashboards.

Looking Forward

These are very exciting times in Triond. We’re hard at work giving you the best possible product and service to suit your needs and we’re introducing new features — sometimes on a daily basis. We have lot more surprises waiting to be revealed and we are already looking forward to it. Stay tuned!