Attacks

Well, I'm back in Cyprus now. I had a 6 hour delay on the flight back so spent time in the airport reading... and getting bored. Instead of arriving at about 10-11pm I arrived after 4am. I guess that means they made up some time, but still it was annoying especially as I had arranged a meeting for 2pm today [Thursday]. So I slept most of the morning and then went to the meeting.

We were discussing the development of the SMS message gateway system we developed. This allows listeners to the radio stations to send SMS messages to people who will follown up with their needs. In at least one country in the Middle East this is the primary method of getting messages and about 15-20 per day are received. One development we would like to do is to integrate with VOIP. VOIP is the system that allows telephone calls to be made over the Internet. This would mean than listeners could phone a Cyprus number and the call would be routed over the Internet to the person who would answer them.

We were also replacing a faulty phone. We developed the current system using cheap 40 pound mobile phones, but one of them has gone faulty and screen is totally back so we have no idea what its doing at all. One of the development things is to upgrade the system to use commercial grade phone modules that will enable us to be more reliable and to do the extra VOIP facilities we want.

It seems upgrading is in the air again... yesterday I had messages from Peter and some of our partners that one of our main servers in London had failed. Obviously I could do nothing about it sitting in an airport lounge [note for techies, I don't have wireless on my laptop so could not use the Internet wireless hotspot... I need a new notebook soon].

Anyhow, today I found out from Peter that the reason for the server going down was that the server had been hijacked by a hacker in Belgium. He had got in using the user name and password of one of our Egyptian support team.

Unfortuneately there is no defence in the world against someone using a legitimate user name and password and all the hacks to our servers have been through this method. We have thoughts about how to upgrade the systems, but we need more people to help and more than anything prayer coverage as nothing can stop this sort of problem.

Please pray for protection for our servers