First up, we want to offer a big heartfelt apology to everyone in the last week or two who has experienced issues (particularly Malware warnings) when visiting the Strong Island website. About two weeks ago we were hacked and the hacker(s) had access to our hosting from the root, so they added Malware links to hundreds of files in most of our websites. To top it off, they added hidden scripts in files that would continue to replicate, so as we cleaned one website, the next day it would be re-infected. We felt like we were chasing our tails for days and our hosting company offered no support or aid in resolving the problem.

Obviously we want you to visit Strong Island and our other websites knowing that you can do so safely and securely and this recent issue has means that quite rightly the red screens of doom from Google, Norton, etc. might mean you are put off visiting us. Fair enough.

Yesterday we worked with Google, Norton and Sucuri and (knock on wood) think we have finally removed the nasty code from the infected websites. One of the main reasons why it took so long to tackle was because of the size of the Strong Island website. Almost 8 years of content mean it is HUGE with tens of thousands of photos, thousands of articles, comments, etc. Scans would take days and by then the code had replicated itself once more. We’ve had to delete some articles sadly, and some images/attachments too, but we had to as part of the fixing process. We’ve also temporarily taken down a couple of our other websites as well.

The good news is…we think we’re back to normal again. Please visit Strong Island as we have had some great articles go up by our awesome contributors in the last week or two, despite the problems. You might have missed these articles so now might be a good time to catch up.

Also, we are launching the brand new Strong Island website in a matter of weeks which is on a totally new host servers, it will be WAY faster to load and has not been infected. Our Strong Island Clothing Co. website is already on the new servers as is the Photo Walkshops website. We will be moving all of the other Strong Island websites to new servers in the next few weeks and leaving our old host for good.

Regarding the new Strong Island website, we cannot wait to share that with you. It has been a long time coming but we think it is something special. We’ll have lots of news about what we’re up to in the next few weeks.

So thank you for your support through the last couple of weeks and if you do still have any issues please let us know via email at: contact@strong-island.co.uk and we’ll try and get them fixed as soon as possible.