art attack – why would people want to hack an online gallery?

In less than two weeks, artFido will have been selling art online for an entire year. It seems like only yesterday that we were telling our friends and family about our idea for an exciting new online gallery; for creating a website that would give artists and galleries an opportunity to sell art online; for reaching new audience of art lovers around the globe. Unfortunately, our excitement for the possibilities may have slightly blinded us from the real, digital dangers of selling art online.

Within weeks of launching the new online gallery, we had already experienced two situations that involved international hackers breaking through our defenses and deleting images from our servers. About 100 images were deleted permanently from the site each time. Why? We have no idea. We asked our IT Support and web builder and they could only suggest reasons. The most likely? Boredom. Yes. Boredom. That was what they suggested had driven a hacker somewhere in Europe to enter the site and do some damage. Sad, don’t you think?

Following those two initial attacks we created back-ups for our back-ups, firewalls for our firewalls and now the site is much better for it. As the saying goes, what doesn’t bring down an online gallery, only makes it stronger. And for the nine months that followed those improvements, those looking to sell art online have been able to do so without incident. Until last week.

On Wednesday of last week our online gallery suffered another attack. But this one came in a very different form. We’re not sure whether it was a automated attack or one driven manually, but a false profile was created and over 70 “buy now” bids placed instantly. Luckily, we were onto this immediately, and no one was seriously affected. Unlike the other attacks, we know why this one occurred. It was an attempt to lure some of our sellers into an obvious and not very creative scam. Here’s an email that one of the sellers received following the false “buy now”:

Dear beloved one in Christ,

I am Mrs. Victoria Dickson, a widow suffering from long time illness (Cancer), I have some funds I inherited from my late loving husband Mr. Mark Dickson, the sum of ($M 11.000) which he deposited in bank here and I need a very honest and God fearing Christian that can use these funds for God’s work, and 15% out of the total funds will be for your compensation for doing this work of God.I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money. I don’t want a situation where this money will be used ungodly way. That is why I take this decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going.

Please if you would be able to use these funds for the Lord’s work kindly reply me.

So, we once again are making the site even stronger. Ensuring that authentic art lovers wanting to buy art online, can. And those wanting to take advantage of our large database of artists and galleries who simply want to sell art online, can’t.

It is becoming evident that we’ll never be truly free from those who want to cause harm to artFido. But the great thing, for us and for our online art community, is that each failed attempt to bring down artFido just makes the online gallery tougher for the next one.