No rest on Labor Day

Today is the first day of school for Elder, and one that will be entirely online. She’s got afternoon sessions, which means that Younger will be looking to me as a playmate. I don’t think I’ll be getting much, if any work done at all. We’re lucky she got the afternoon spot though, cause the eight to noon spot would be even worse.

Yesterday morning I produced a Labor Day Breakfast for the local political party. It was in Zoom, and they called me about three days out to put it together. I managed to use OBS as a virtual camera, and was able to queue up a half dozen videos in OBS so that we weren’t struggling with it using Zoom’s sharing capabilities. I just set the scene in OBS, put the spotlight on my video stream and hit transition. Voila!

It went really well, but was really harrowing. There was probably close to two dozen speakers, including our Senator, several Representatives, as well as numerous state officials. I managed to keep it on track, except for some of the speeches. By the end I was playing people off, Improv-style. The whole thing was about two hours. One attendee remarked that it was the best-run Zoom meeting that they ever saw. There was over one hundred people on it at one point.

Then as soon as I was done with that I had to get ready for a pool party, which meant I had to run to the grocery store for last-minute shopping. I only picked up a few things, but the store was crowded. As soon as I got back Missus loaded the kids up and we went to pick up her mom and headed off to the party.

I didn’t get to enjoy it for long.

About an hour after we got there, I got a message from a political committee member that the website had been “hacked”. I pulled it up and was met with the bare directory listing for the WordPress site. Index.php was missing, so my first thought was that it was a failed upgrade. I tried to pull up my management console on my phone to restore a backup, but the most recent one was months old. Oops. So much for relaxing.

I’m not going to get into the details of the hack or the recovery, I think this was a simple case of credentials being leaked. There were too many people that had access to it, and the committee secretary was given the site admin credentials to use to post on the page. Yikes!

I cleared that situation up with them and urged everyone to check their antivirus. One of the committee chairs was running a Mac with nothing but Malwarebytes on it. I swear. I locked the site down as much as I could with free versions of Securi and Ninja Scanner, so I think things are cool for now. This is the second time this site has been hacked though, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

I just checked the login attempts on the site, two attempts from Rio De Janeiro overnight.