Hackers fail to break Audlem Online

Eagle-eyed readers will have noted that our choice of Homepage photos in recent weeks has been a trifle dated. Most of the photos published recently appeared on exactly the same date last year.

The explanation should be simple, but as with so much computing technology, isn't. It all started four weeks ago when our technical team were alerted, in the middle of the night, to an attempted hack into Audlem Online.

Investigation revealed two potential suspects. Firstly, a Russian SPAM company based in Siberia attempting to post unwanted advertisements for products no self-respecting reader of Audlem Online could possibly be interested in.

Secondly, we deduced it could be News International* trying to access our file of up-coming stories to see if we had a scoop that may be of interest to one of their surviving newspapers.

As the attempted hack was unsuccessful, we eliminated News International as they seem to be able to hack successfully with impunity into any device, however well protected.

Unfortunately, the technical fix to eliminate any future hacking attempts has come with collateral damage to our program that selects the Homepage photos. Normally, the Webteam select up-to-date Homepage photos by sending coms-packets to a stationary SDSL router. The router backdates transfer clusters with multiple nodes, helping to optimise SQL and ensure data integrity.

Management of the paired raid drives, is inter-cooled and back-spun – with compressed tarballs, backed up across a gigabit SAN. The mainframe target source is modular, receiving periodic updates from a satellite launched in 2004. The ending of the Space Shuttle program means the fix is taking longer than expected. 

We apologise for any inconvenience, particularly to those photographers that have sent us shots recently and which we would have used on the Homepage in recent weeks. If, however, an unusual shot pops up on the Homepage in the near future, you now know the reason why.

*Audlem Online's lawyers have asked us to make it clear that we accept fully that neither Rupert Murdoch nor James Murdoch would have had any knowledge of what was going on in the company they run and that we are not casting any aspersions on their personal integrity or grasp of detail about any events, alleged, real or imaginary, at News International, News Corp or any subsidiaries thereof. We are happy to state this clearly.  

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.