Blogger.com, the web publishing tool that works behind Onlineblog and around 749,000 other weblogs, was attacked by hackers late yesterday (UK time), and closed for around two and a half hours. Lots of accounts, including ours, were broken into and the word "hacx0red" left in the blog address field of our settings, which messed up the RSS feed.
I was impressed by the speed of Blogger's reaction: recovering the service in two and a half hours using redundant servers was pretty impressive. Above all, it shows the operation has become a lot bigger since the last hacker attack late in 2001, when it took weeks for full functionality to return to the service.
Then, before he started charging for Blogger Pro, CEO, CTO and teaboy Evan Williams had to do all the work himself, using a dial-up connection from his parents' house. That Blogger Pro cash seems to be getting spend well, on staff and servers.
Still, it's very alarming that it even happened, and I hope the Blogger guys don't let their swift recovery obscure the fact they just had a major security breach that's going to send lots of their more advanced users into the arms of Moveable Type, Greymatter and Radio Userland. Those apps might not be as easy to use, but do allow you to host the whole thing yourself - meaning you're not relying on someone else to manage security properly, or keep the servers up.
Of course, that's a responsibility many people could do without. But it does lead on to the interesting question about the future of centrally hosted web services. Since we're seeing online services big (Microsoft) to small (Pyra) being hit by hackers, do we just assume the centralised future we're being sold by various people is going to be a rather messy one?
News.com has coverage of the attack, while Evan Williams' weblog links to other coverage.
