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By suzipiker spiker July 03, 2008 09:33 AM

Welcome to the Sunrise Herald with Giselle Goodman, the place to go to get the news from overnight and onward...
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I've been missing you all over the past couple days. Hope you haven't given up on us. And I can't promise much, since we haven't completely recovered from our technical troubles. Read the story posted below for an explanation...

IN THE WEATHER

At 6 a.m., downtown Portland was under bright, dry skies at 61 degrees.

After a sunny morning and early afternoon, a cold front pushes through and brings a line of severe thunderstorms through the Route 1 corridor. Storms strongest in the west, but certainly no one is spared. Bangor is experiencing the strong showers now. Temps in the mid 80s, but decreasing as the day goes on.

Towmorrow, dry and cool. Perfect parade and picnic weather.

ON THE ROAD:

• Between mile 60 and 61 in Gray, a northbound lane closure is scheduled from 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Eagles Nest Road Bridge for bridge work. 50 mph work zone speed limits are in effect.

ON THE OCEAN:

Haven't had one of these in a while: A SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY is in effect from 11 a.m. this morning until late tonight as a front blows in some gusty breezes. Expect southwestern winds blowing 15 to 20 knots, with gusts up to 25 knots. Seas 2 to 4 feet with a chance of thunderstorms late this morning and afternoon.

High tide in Portland will be at 11:54 a.m. and then again around midnight. Low tide was at 5:39 a.m. and will be low again around 5:45 p.m.

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THE NEWEST NEWS:

By Staff Writer Noel K. Gallagher

PORTLAND — A computer attack described as a “simplistic hack” caused the Web site of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and 10 affiliated sites to crash, making them only intermittently available for more than five days, company officials said Wednesday.

“It broke our traffic management tool,” causing the servers that manage the sites to overload, said President and General Manager Rob Bickler. The problem was discovered Thursday night and continued as of Wednesday afternoon, he said.

“I heard it was a real simplistic hack,” Bickler said. But because the traffic management tool was broken, the volume of incoming visitors overloaded the system, he said.

The sites average about 10 million page views a month, according to Dan Dinsmore, director of MaineToday.com.

To fix the problem, technicians replaced a hardware switch Wednesday night at the warehouse in Massachusetts where the company’s servers are housed. In addition, company technicians and an outside contractor have been rewriting sections of software code that were destroyed by the attack.

Some of the newly written code has provided a temporary, partial fix to the problem, Bickler said.

The sites, which were initially completely inaccessible to viewers, now appear, but they are very slow to load, he said.

“It’s fixed in part now, but we would hope it’s entirely fixed by week’s end,” Bickler said.

The company has also installed a new firewall to prevent future intrusions, according to Dinsmore. Details about the attack were not available, although Bickler said the intruder was not able to access any sensitive data, such as financial or personal identity information.

“We are beefing up safeguards to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Bickler said.

As well as affecting the Web sites, the problem disabled the e-mail system for MaineToday.com employees. The e-mail systems for other company employees were unaffected.

This kind of attack “happens all the time,” said Joe Kumiszcza, executive director of the Technology Association of Maine, a trade association for Maine’s software and information technology industry. “We’ve been ‘cracked’ as well. That’s the first time I’ve admitted that in public.”

Bickler said he could not estimate the total cost of the Web site problems.

Some readers and online advertisers have contacted the company about the problems, Dinsmore said.

No credits to advertisers are planned, he said, but the company will make sure it honors the contracts it has with online advertisers.
Contracts may have conditions, for instance, that an advertisement must get a certain number of views in a given time frame.

“We appreciate everyone’s patience,” Bickler said.

Publisher Charles Cochrane said he did not think the problems would affect the company’s efforts to sell the newspapers. MaineToday Media, Inc., a subsidiary of the Seattle Times Co., announced in March that it would try to sell the Press Herald/Telegram and its other Maine media holdings.

“I don’t think so,” Cochrane said. “Technical things happen, and glitches happen and hacks happen, so we don’t anticipate that.”