Bektour Iskender talks to neweurasia about his website, Kloop.kg, being attacked by hackers.

Q: What happened to your website, Bektour?

A: On the 3rd of August 2007, Kloop was attacked by hackers (or by a single hacker, which is most likely) who deleted most of the blogs that are hosted on our virtual community platform. That was quite shocking. You know, we are young, and we weren’t ready for such kind of things. Thankfully, me and the user Gaara (who is one of the coordinators of the project) restored all the active blogs during some 30 hours after the attack. Though we had to spend all the night in the office doing it manually.

Q: How did your users react to the attack?

A: We were glad to see that users showed a lot of understanding. We posted the information about the attack the same day it happened, so everyone was informed. We asked them no to restore the blogs by themselves, because it could lead to some confusion. So… They just waited, and on the evening of the 4th of August they could reach their blogs again.

Q: Do you have any ideas as to who did that to you? Was it an intentional attack from within Kyrgyzstan, or just a bored hacker sitting somewhere in Russia?

A: There are some people who are under suspicion, but until we don’t have the facts in our hands, I can’t say any names. What is good is that we know the exact time of the attack. And we checked the IP logs of the website for that period of time: it was visited by people from Kyrgyzstan only. So… I don’t really think that it was someone from abroad. We continue our investigation, we hope that the Internet providers will help us with that, but we need to pass some levels of bureaucracy first.

Q: What measures do you put in place to prevent something like that from happening again?

A: The day after the attack Gaara and I learned some better ways of making daily backups of the blogs. So if something like that happens next time, it will take us probably an hour to restore all the blogs (thirty times less time than on Saturday night…).

The problem is that we don’t have funds for hiring a security specialist. Kloop will face significant changes in the end of August. We will redesign the whole blogs section, for example, making it more user-friendly. We would also like to add the “Donate” feature, like the one on Wikipedia. While Kloop is owned by Kloop Media Foundation, which is a non-commercial organisation, we can gather funds through donations. If that works, we can hire a specialist who helps us with security, backups, and archiving.