Bilerico is Going Dark Temporarily

UPDATED: Here is some additional information from Bilerico Editor in Chief, Bill Browning, concerning the hacker attack on Bilerico Project and its affilaited blogs:
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I wanted to give folks a quick heads up on what's happened to the Bilerico Project and our affiliated sites. All of our sites are currently dark - they've been taken offline by a massive hacker attack.

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We've been fighting off these Eastern European hackers for over a year now; they're the same crowd that took down popular feminist political blog Shakespeare's Sister a year and a half ago. They're professionals and they're nasty.

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Earlier this week, they managed to take us down for about 9 hours overnight but we were able to regain control. They severely compromised the server though, so we had to get a new server up and running quickly. Yesterday, we got the new server racked up and were planning on making all of the switch overs (we also host quite a few Indiana LGBT organizations' websites), but the hackers managed to crack through our defenses again yesterday afternoon.

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This time they firebombed the place; our old server is toast. Unfortunately, none of the data was transferred before they regained control. We have backups and are trying to get the site back up ASAP, but we're still suffering from the lag required to set up a new server from scratch, retrieve as much data as possible from the old server, install all of our attendant software like Movable Type, and then port over the Bilerico database and double check to make sure it all works again since our site was so customized.

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I have no idea when the site will be back up and running. We're hopeful that we can have it all finished by Friday night, but there's no guarantee. The hackers caused massive damage, but co-owner and tech guru Jerame Davis is working feverishly to fix everything.

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Not too long ago Pam's House Blend and other liberal blogs using the same platform went dark as a result of hackers. Now, The Bilerico Project and its affiliated blogs have been attacked and the result is that a new server is being set up as quickly as possible. Bill Browning sent all contributors this note today:

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We will be moving to a new server tomorrow afternoon. As you saw on TBP's front page this week, we were hit by hackers again. We regularly fight off these Denial of Service attacks (we're an LGBT liberal blog; it comes with the territory), but this time our server is toast. They killed it.

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Thanks for your patience as we migrate to the new server. The good news out of all of this is that we'll plenty of room now for even more visitors; we'd almost outgrown our old server capacity! Let's keep up the hard work and continue to grow the Bilerico sites. We may have bumps in the road like this one, but we just keep improving thanks to all of you!

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It's a sad commentary that the wingnuts feel they have to knock down sites since they cannot counter sound arguments with anything but religious fanaticism and untruths. Bilerico should be back up unscathed within a day or so at most.