Hacked off

Right, the hacking.

I am entirely sure that you have noticed how difficult it has become to access these pages.

This is because, as we know, somebody has hacked the site.

It is probably not an individual somebody, a smelly rascal eating pizza in pyjamas, staring at the computer screen in their bedroom and laboriously typing in lines of code and thinking smugly how much they would like to spoil my website.

It is most probably one of those things called a bot, which despite the horrid images of them crawling all over the cyber universe, feasting on people’s data. These are not real creatures, and do not do anything other than cause a lot of nuisance. The point of this particular bot seems just to be to get you to look at a very rubbish advert and click on the not-especially -enticing box, after which a spidery hole appears in your bank account and all of the money is squirrelled away to somewhere in Nigeria.

I think that this is what it does.

Today I had a long conversation with somebody from the web hosting site.

I did not know what these were until I had a website.

Effectively, they are my cyber-landlord. I buy website space from them, and they do something technical so that whenever somebody writes the catchy Windermere Diaries title on their computer, some online cleverness brings this very page on to the screen of their computer. They look after all of the pages in a cupboard of their enormous computer, rotating around the earth at a rate of fifty revolutions a second. Thus, whenever you want to read any page, from any time you like, it is all there, carefully stacked in my small, probably dusty, rented corner, ready to be dug out and zapped down the internet to your very breakfast table.

You can even search for key words if you like, like ‘dogs’, and instantly get a list of every page on which they were ever mentioned, not that I suppose anybody would bother.

The number I rang was for London, but the man on the other end of the phone was certainly American, oh the magic of the cyber-universe.

I explained the problem.

We talked about it for ages.

It turns out that the web hosting sites do not think that this is their problem. He was terribly sympathetic, and explained carefully what was happening. The virus, he said, was a line of malicious code on the Configuration page of my website. This could be cleaned, he said, but it would take time and could only be done by an expert, probably somebody with an FTP downloaded on to their computer.

I do not know what this is.

Effectively I have got rats in my online cupboard. They are eating things and doing cyber-poo on my pages, and the only way to get them out of all of the horrible cracks in the woodwork where they have gone to lurk, is to call Rentokil.

This will cost, he explained, seven hundred and nineteen pounds.

You will not be at all astonished to learn that I did not go rushing for my credit card.

I told him that this was not going to happen, and eventually after much negotiation, he told me that there was a cheap program that they could run which might or might not work, because it was cheap, and which could be mine for only fifty quid, but no guarantees, you understand.

I declined that as well, and thanked him and hung up.

I am writing now to tell you that I am undecided about what I will do now.

It appears that the virus is there for the foreseeable future, unless I can find somebody with considerably more computing expertise than I have, who is prepared to fix it in exchange for gratitude and possibly cake. Given that as far as I am aware not a single one of my acquaintance fits that bill, I am not expecting a rush of volunteers, so I will have to think of a Plan B.

These are the options.

I could just carry on and run an irritating website with an irritating and potentially dangerous virus, especially if anybody is foolish enough to click on the Click Here box.

I could stop having a website.

I could ditch everything I have written so far and get a new website, we could call it Windermere Dairies or something.

I could give the web host fifty quid and hope it works.

I have not decided, and will keep you updated.

The picture is my husband and son, going on a Brave New World shopping trip.

LATER NOTE: We may be saved. I do have a friend with more knowledge than I do, who has promised to take a look next week. He is very clever and important and might be just the chap.

I am going to start baking cake tomorrow.

Fingers crossed.