Dear Customer,
"The FBI is investigating a new computer worm that surfaced Tuesday and is considered so aggressive that computer security experts urged people not to surf the Web until they have updated their antivirus programs."
As you might imagine, Tuesday, September 18th was an unprecendented day for iMakeNews. Just as we were getting back on track after the September 11th tragedy, we and many 1,000's of other companies started to see the extreme effects of an Internet Worm called NIMDA. This worm, which is described in the above news article, was more aggressive than anything security experts have seen before. Because it spread itself both through Email and the Web (two of our primary delivery formats) we made the difficult decision to lock down our service immediately so that we could: assess the danger, protect our customers, and fend off this attack through re-doubled security measures.
Our servers were offline from approximately 09:30AM 09/18/01 (when the attack was first launched) to 04:30AM 09/19/01 (when our engineers were once again confident in our security measures). We appologize for the lack of communication available during this time. The comprehensive nature of this attack made it inadvisable for us to put up even a message on our Web site without risk of a potential security breach.
The good news is that NO CUSTOMER DATA WAS AFFECTED and we are back online - your data is safe and secure. We appreciate your patience and understanding. We would also like to reaffirm our promise to you to do everything possible to protect your interests now and in the future. We are dishartened by the suspicious timing of this worm, unleashed one week (to the hour) of the September 11th tragedy. However, as Americans we will prevail and fight back against un-American acts both in the online and offline worlds.
-The iMakeNews Team
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