You might have noticed that we had to take the site down for a little over 24 hours. So what exactly happened?
First of all, let us take the opportunity to thank everybody for the emails, texts, phone calls and DM's from our readers asking what had gone wrong. We really appreciate the very warm response we had to our outage.
So why exactly did FCP.co go offline?
When a site grows to a particular size, it becomes attractive to people who either want to gain entry to the back end of the site for a 'trophy hack' or (and this is much worse) harness the power of your server to do naughty things on the internet. By that we don't mean hosting dodgy pictures, but have you ever wondered where all that spam gets sent from?
So we got hacked.
This is not the first time either and it is just par for the course when running a successful website. The previous attack was a particularly nasty one that happened on New Year's Eve 2012. In that hack, every PHP file had obfuscated code added that caused the redirection of traffic to another site when clicking on a social media link or embed. So just delete the extra code we hear you say? Well, that wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that there were over 36,000 PHP files on the server!
We have a very good hosting company and a quick restore from a twice daily off-server backup fixed that one.
Sunday's attack was slightly different. This time new files were placed on the server which caused the machine to act as a bot under somebody else's control. The hosting company (quite rightly) immediately took the server offline which meant the 404 page that everybody saw in their browsers for the last 24 hours. As all the HTML was disabled, we couldn't even put a 'sorry we are offline' page up!
To get the site back, our web programmer had to go through all the files looking for rogue code and things that shouldn't be there. Although there are tools that make this job easier, it still takes time and thankfully, just over 24 hours from the outage we were back online.
FCP.co has grown over the three and a half years of its life. We have steadily growing traffic with currently over 150,000 unique visitors a month, or if your prefer, nearly a million and a half unique visitors in the last year.
Let's just repeat that if any prospective advertisers are out there, nearly a million and a half unique visitors in the last year!
To run FCP.co properly, we have a beefy 2U server sitting in the rack at our hosting company. It has been upgraded three times and has a 5 drive SAS RAID attached. The goal is to get pages from our CMS to load as fast as they can, for that you need the CPU power.
Thus, this internet connected beast becomes a target for hackers. Never mind somebody's PC at home, left unchecked, our server is capable of spewing out herbal viagra and weight loss emails in alarming volumes.
That's why we had to go offline.
So, back to normal? Almost. There might be a reoccurrence of the hack and the site might temporarily go offline for software upgrades. We will try to keep the disruption to a minimum. Was any user data compromised? We don't think so as our site doesn't ask for credit cards so the data has limited worth. It would be good practice to change your user password.
Now the news catchup begins!
I am the Editor-in-Chief of FCP.co and have run the website since its inception ten years ago.
I have also worked as a broadcast and corporate editor for over 30 years, starting on one inch tape, working through many formats, right up to today's NLEs.
Under the name Idustrial Revolution, I have written and sold plugins for Final Cut Pro for 13 years.
I was made a Freeman of Lichfield through The Worshipful Company of Smiths (established 1601). Though I haven't yet tried to herd a flock of sheep through the city centre!
Current Editing
2020 has been busy, the beginning of the year was finishing off a new property series (cut on FCP) for Channel 4 called The Great House Giveaway. I also designed and built the majority of the graphics as Motion templates. It has been a great success and the shows grabbed more viewers in the 4pm weekday slot than any previous strand. It has been recommissioned by C4 for 60 episodes, including prime-time versions and five themed programmes. The shows have also been nominated for a 2021 BAFTA.
Although both were postponed to later in the year, I worked again on ITV's coverage of the Tour de France and La Vuelta. 2020 was my 25th year of editing the TdF and my 20th year as lead editor. The Tour was the first broadcast show to adopt FCPX working for multiple editors on shared storage.
BBC's Snooker has played a big part in my life, I've been editing tournament coverage since 1997. I'm proud to be part of a very creative team that has pioneered many new ideas and workflows that are now industry standard in sports' production. This is currently an Adobe Premiere edit.
Covid cancelled some of the regular corporate events that I edit such as trade shows & events. I was lucky however to edit, from home, on projects for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Black Friday, Mastercard and very proud to have helped local charitable trust Kendall & Wall secure lottery funding.
As for software, my weapon of choice is Final Cut Pro and Motion, but I also have a good knowledge and broadcast credits with Adobe Premiere Pro, MOGRT design and Photoshop.
Plugin Design & Development
I'm the creative force behind Idustrial Revolution, one of the oldest Final Cut Pro plugin developers. It hosts a range of commercial and free plugins on the site. One free plugin was downloaded over a thousand times within 24 hours of release.
I also take on custom work, whether it is adapting an existing plugin for a special use or designing new plugins for clients from scratch. Having a good knowledge of editing allows me to build-in flexibility and more importantly, usability.
FCP.co
Now in its 10th year and 4th redesign, running FCP.co has given me knowledge on how to run a large CMS- you are currently reading my bio from the database! Although it sounds corny, I am pretty well up on social media trends & techniques, especially in the video sector. The recent Covid restrictions has enabled live FCP.co shows online. This involves managing a Zoom Webinar through Restream.io to YouTube and Facebook.
The Future
I'm always open to new ideas and opportunities, so please get in touch at editor (at) fcp.co. I've judged film competitions, presented workflow techniques to international audiences and come up with ideas for TV shows and software programs!
