Dear Immigration Daily Readers,
We regret to state that we were malevolently and destructively attacked on Saturday, April 27th by hacker(s). We do not at this point know who attacked us or why. What we do know is that the hacker(s) destroyed most of our site - two and a half years of hard work.
The good news is that no vital information was compromised or destroyed. To the best of our knowledge, no alien case information was in any way touched or compromised. We designed our systems in such a way that secure data should not be accessed by unauthorized persons even in this kind of catastrophe. Just in case any hackers are reading this, please be aware that we do not store any kind of credit card information on any of our machines.
Many internet sites - Yahoo and The New York Times for example - have been hacked in the past and have come back stronger than ever. We expect to do the same. The entire ILW.COM team has been hard at work round-the-clock to restore the site. As of May 1, 2002 morning, we are about half way through the recovery and restoration process.
We are proud that until this catastrophe, we did not miss a single scheduled issue of Immigration Daily. Even on September 11th, 2001 we produced a news issue. However, this disaster forced us to cancel our issue of April 30, 2002. Barring another calamity, we expect to publish a full news issue for May 2, 2002.
We would like to request help from any of our readers who have suffered a hacking incident and can share their experience on forensics and preparation of material for handing over to law enforcement. As to law enforcement for cyber crimes, it appears that there are several local, state and federal agencies that one could go to. Any suggestion as to who to approach would be welcome. We particularly hope that some of our readers in government will come forward with some advice for us. Emails on this matter should be sent to webmaster@ilw.com.
Yours truly,
Sam Udani, Publisher
