Lobo fans and Web surfers might have had a hard time trying to view UNM's athletics department's Web site, www.golobos.com, Monday because hackers successfully shut it down.
The site didn't come back online until Tuesday. About a month's worth of information was lost in the process, said Greg Remington, associate athletics director for media relations. Remington compared the incident to someone breaking into a person's house.
"You feel kind of violated," Remington said.
Wayne Johnson, president of Vista Media Productions, Inc., which provides the database system that the Web site operates on, said the company had been monitoring attempts to hack the site since March.
The hackers broke into the system a couple of times this summer, he said, and a new firewall was built to protect it. A firewall is a system designed to isolate and better protect computers and computer servers from the Internet.
Johnson said hackers managed to find a backdoor into the system on Monday and denied access to the site. The company tried to fix the problem and got the site back up.
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But when workers visited the site at about 2 p.m., they received a forbidden access message.
"(The hackers) did a lot," Johnson said. "They didn't do anything as far as leaving anything in (the system). They were probably trying to do something with the server that they didn't want us to find."
Remington said among the information lost Monday were all profiles of the fall sports teams, including biographies and photos of about 120 football players and coaches.
"That probably takes 5-7 minutes per person," Remington said. " It's quite a task. It takes the same for volleyball and men's and women's soccer, in addition to updating certain staff members."
Johnson said Vista Media is working with the Athletics department to restore all the lost data. Remington said he did not know how long it would take to return all the data onto the site. He said if he and his staff dedicated themselves solely to restoring the Web site, it would take about a couple of days to complete the task.
A statement explaining Monday's events is posted at the top of the Web site. It reports that the department was "in the process of evaluating and restoring the lost data."
Most sections for the 17 athletics programs at least have the coaching staff listings posted.
The football section has most of its press releases and a partial roster list.
The softball section lists former coach Susan Craig and her staff. The skiing, track and field/cross-country and women's tennis teams have nothing listed in their sections.
Johnson said the information that was lost since July may have been the result of previous hacking attempts.
He said the company has a backup system in Florida that saves data from the site on a weekly basis.
However, some of it was corrupted during the past four weeks and was not successfully saved. Johnson said the saving policy has since changed to a daily basis.
Steve Johnson, vice president of Vista Media Productions, Inc., said he worked about 36 hours straight rebuilding the system and installing the latest security software.
While it provides more safety, Steve said it is not a guarantee that the site will not be hacked into again.
Steve Johnson said hackers have a number of ways to break into a system. In this case, he said the hackers used a program that overwhelmed the system with thousands of requests of a normal service in a very short period of time.
Eventually, the system denied access to anybody who legitimately was trying to view the site. He said it left the system vulnerable to the hackers.
"Once they got access, they deleted information," Steve Johnson said. "Once access has been gained, you don't know what they have done to the server. The only alternative is to essentially rebuild an entire software service system."
