Something odd landed on my desk this year.
Websites get hacked all the time, and it is not unusual to see illegal content slipped into a page. Most of the time the keywords are predictable: gambling, pornography, that sort of thing. But this was the first time I had seen someone hang a blunt reference to male genitalia right on a corporate site.
At first, it looked like simple vandalism. Then I thought about it a little more. If the attacker had a grudge against the company, the choice suddenly made a little more sense.
After checking further, though, the case became stranger.
Normally, when a site is compromised, the homepage is the main target. This one was different: the backend had been hit. I accessed the admin area through the internal network and found a rather interesting scene waiting there.
It turned out the company had not paid its employees. Those employees, with nowhere else to vent, had used the official website’s message board to leave two angry comments.
Strictly speaking, my job was simple: delete the two messages, restore the website, and move on. From a professional standpoint, that would have been the cleanest fix.
But from a moral standpoint, I had no intention of doing that.
I tried to express my view tactfully to the sales colleague involved. It seemed this colleague did not think the company had done anything wrong. So I had to handle it in my own way.
The world still needs justice. And if everything around you is dark, then even a black kind of justice is still worth something.
I copied the company’s compromised database, hid the copy, and set the live database to read-only.
The company then tried to do exactly what I had done: access the backend through the internal network and delete the posts themselves.
So I installed TheWorld Browser 3 for them.
For reference, the IE11 on that server was a browser from 2013. TheWorld Browser 3 was from 2008. Their server memory was pitifully low anyway; it was not as if it could run a proper modern browser.
I wanted to see whether they actually intended to pay their employees.
If not, they should stop parading around online pretending to be respectable.
I also hope those workers, people I have never met and do not know, can receive what they are owed. At this point in the year, they ought to be able to go home and spend the holiday properly, shouldn’t they?