A couple of weeks before Christmas I was contacted by a friend who was in a state of slight panic.

She runs two website, one selling a waterproofing product, the other a range clothing – the connection being that they are both equine related, tack waterproofer & a range of jodphurs.

Both sites had been hacked, displaying a rather unpleasant set of adverts when viewed on a tablet or phone – the desktop view was unaffected, presumably to avoid giving notice to the site administrators.

The sits had been developed independently, one outsourced to an Indian company, the other to a UK based developer. Although one site had only recently cleaned up by the Indian software house their immediate reaction was to demand a fee before even looking at the problem. The UK developers appeared to be busy and didn't respond at once.

The attack also seemed to prevent anyone logging in as an administrator, so at my suggestion she appealed for a restore from a backup to her hosting company. Their reaction was to delete the content of both sites, leaving her with them displaying the Apache test page.

And this in the run up to Christmas, the busiest time of year for almost every on-line shop.

We decided to help. At first that was limited to attempting to get the hosting company to perform the restore, but it appeared the backup cycle was not frequent. I was able to check that the databases were intact, although that was of little use without the code. Finally the hosting company was able to come through with an old restore for the waterproofing products site (which fortunately doesn't change as often as the other) and the UK developers found a more recent backup for the jodhpurs site.

Frustrated by the time taken by her suppliers – this being now just a couple of days before Christmas – she asked if we would host the sites. Switching over took just a day, but by the time we had sorted out a couple of issues with the DNS records Christmas was upon us. At least the sites were OK and running or so we thought

You can see for yourselves that both sites Equipel and Justjodz are up to date, in working order and receiving regular orders.

And on a personal note, upon the final resolution of the problems, it is always gratifying to receive a message such as this: Hailing you as the IT master right now