Wow, pokemon cards as ransom, that's a new one for me. The post doesn't say how much later the message was sent, so it could possibly be a troll who noticed the website was missing data. But still that's quite a story. Sorry that happened to you guys.
Wow that really sucks. I'm sorry this happened to you guys. Hopefully you've got a backup on a USB somewhere. If not, all the best with working on a brand-new site! =)
>The team first reverse-engineered our backup script to delete all of our offsite backups.<p>I guess the permission should be one way. The production server can only push data to backup server, never to delete or overwrite anything even if it wanted to.
what software introduced the vulnerability? it seems sorta odd to write an article about this and not warn others how to prevent it or document exactly what went wrong