Deepest apologies to those of you who were unable to access Luxury Home Digest this past week.
It seems we were the victim of a malevolent hacking attack last Sunday night, whereby all of our content was deleted–on not only Luxury Home Digest, but San Diego Previews as well. Thanks to the tireless work of blogging gurus at the Real Estate Tomato, we have been able to restore most of our material.
And thanks to those who brought this site and our San Diego real estate blogsite down, I am now musing about the consequences for such actions.
Is attacking a website and deleting its content a crime? And if more than one attacker, a conspiracy?
Could such activity constitute a “restraint of trade” as defined by the Federal Trade Commission? Google definitions, as usual, provide some clues:
1. Descriptive of unreasonable acts or contracts which prevent a person from carrying on, or engaging in, their profession.
www.aapa.org/manual/judicial/glossary.html
2. Combinations, contracts, or other oral or written arrangements designed to establish a monopoly position, impede competition, fix prices, or prevent entry by potential rivals. …
www.itcdonline.com/introduction/glossary2_q-z.html
3. Monopolies, combinations, and contracts that impede free competition.
www.crfonline.org/orc/glossary/r.html
4. Any act that tends to prevent free competition in business
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
5. Restraint of trade is a restriction on a person’s freedom to conduct business in a specified or unspecified location for a specified or unspecified length of time. Such restrictions are normally enacted by contracts. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint of trade
Yes, our San Diego real estate business was impeded, and we were prevented from carrying on in our profession in a normal manner. Clients were unable to search for San Diego properties on our sites and we were blocked from our online business for several days. Searchers for luxury home news were certainly forced to go elsewhere when we were offline.
And if restraint of trade is “any act that tends to prevent free competition in business,” or places “a restriction on a person’s freedom to conduct business in a specified or unspecified location for a specified or unspecified length of time,” then restraint of trade is what I will politely and publicly call last Sunday night’s massacre.
Under my breath, though, other expletives words and descriptions are uttered.…
Welcome back.
Can’t speak to US law, but here in the UK, hacking that involves deleting data is a breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and carries a maximum of 5 years in prison.
Of course, the biggest problem is that most hackers are in either the former Soviet Union, or the Far East (but not China, where the penalty for hacking has been known to be execution.)
Mark,
Thanks!
I know neither the laws nor the penalties for hacking crimes in this country–nor do I know if this was an act of stupidity or malice.
Roberta,
VERY interesting. I wasn’t even aware of the repercussions of such an evil deed. Nice to know and hopefully the culprit will be caught.
Gena:
After giving Mark Harrison’s comment some thought, I have decided that something short of a firing squad or a life strapped to a keyboard would be fair.
Grrrr!
I think it is a “sad” person who would spend their time sabotaging your site. Too bad they don’t have a life.
Phyllis:
I’d prefer about 8 degrees of separation from jerks like this.
Find out who they are and we’ll ALL go after them!
Susan:
I am putting out feelers with folk who might have an in of any sort at Google. This breach and attack seem to have occurred at an interesting time.
Now back to putting things back into order. This has been an absolute nightmare….
It’s a vicious crime! I wonder if you will ever find out if they catch the creep and what the penalty will be. Glad you are back up and running.
Terri:
Still doing damage control on the back end. Never gave it much thought before, but I now join you in your opinion: It’s a serious crime that deserves legal attention.
Hacking seems to be a federal crime of some sort. A local tech group hacked into a former employer’s system to steal some customer contact data and got caught.
The designated “fall guy” pled guilty in a plea bargain deal and is now a convicted felon albeit a free one.
Jim:
Thanks for the example of hacking penalties. I would imagine that substantial legal fees were also paid to negotiate such a deal.
I could personally think of a few more creative penalties for the hacking of web or blog sites.