Dear users:
We are contacting you to follow up on an alert e-mailed to ABPnews.com e-mail subscribers and shared on Facebook and Twitter yesterday regarding access to our website. We are pleased to report that as of Saturday, September 18, the websites for ABP and our three New Voice Media publishing partners — the Baptist Standard of Texas, Religious Herald of Virginia and Word & Way of Missouri — are operational again. Thank you for your patience. Below is a brief summary to bring you up to date.
What Happened
Access to our websites was interrupted beginning Thursday evening, September 16, due to a virus planted by a malicious hacker. As a result, and as a protection for users who attempted to log on to any of our sites, Google preemptively blocked access to all four sites.
What We Have Done
New Voice Media's Web-development partner and its technical support provider acted immediately and worked around the clock to address the problem and to get the sites up and running as soon as possible. The virus was identified and removed. Once this process was completed, we went through the steps required by Google for our sites to be unblocked. As of Saturday morning, September 18, all four sites were functioning again.
Where We Are Now
ABP's staff is now working to re-post articles from Thursday that were lost, along with whatever comments we can recover from that day. The software installed to make sure all New Voice partner sites are free of any viruses or malware also created some technical glitches. If you encounter any area of our site that does not appear to be working properly, please email us at [email protected].
Safeguards for You
As always, it is important that you keep your computer up to date with the latest version of your anti-virus program and other software. If your computer uses a Microsoft Windows operating system, our web developer uses and recommends Microsoft Security Essentials, a free anti-virus program. To download and install this free program, log on to Microsoft Security Essentials.
Again, thank you for your patience. Now, we hope you will log on and catch up on the latest news and commentary at www.baptistnews.com!
David Wilkinson
Executive Director
Associated Baptist Press