By Landon Stark

Last week the school’s phones began to ring off the walls with people calling, looking for answers about our website’s “new look.” Everyone was confused about what happened until we were told that our site had been hacked. As of today, our website is up and functional again but questions still remain.

We contacted Web Project Manager of Websites to Impress, Austin Scott, to get answers to any questions people may have. Scott verifies our website is now fully functional, and his company is “about 90%” of the way done with fixing the problem. All that needed to be done, said Scott, was replace the information with backups of our server. They have this information in case things like this happens.

Scott stated, “We are now just updating software, also like your anti-virus programs on your computer, in order to help prevent this from happening again.” He also assured us that with the new software updates, it will be harder for this to happen again.

Though this is all good information to hear, what exactly happened to our website? When asked Scott said, “The hackers used a method of hacking known as ‘brute force’ hacking. By doing so they were able to get the password to the admin account.”

Why did small little Atlantic High School’s website get hacked? According to Scott, “It was more than just us, other companies also were hacked. It was a much bigger attack than what we know.” So we aren’t really sure how many websites were hacked besides just ours.

As the week continues the disruption caused by our website being hacked will slowly die down, and with this relieving information it should help people calm down. We now all hope this doesn’t happen again, but “with all the use of technology these things can happen,” said ACSD Technology Director Roger Warne.