It’s the cyberspace equivalent of coming home to find your space has been invaded. Nothing of value taken but you feel violated by an unknown intruder who has “touched” your stuff. It happened to us at radioinfo this week.

First it was a handful of those who subscribe to our daily newsletter who got one of those “Hello dearest friend, I am Jesus Mboko from Swaziland” letters pasted into their radio industry update. Then it was a bogus job ad that was seen by about 40 people before we noticed it and pulled it down.

The real problem though is not the hack itself but getting our house back in order, so to speak. Making the necessary changes to our back end meant that we couldn’t upload To all or any of our readers who have been affected by this act of skulduggery, our humble apologies. Please rest assured that our top computer dudes (they do so hate to be called nerds) have been hard at it all day purging the bugs from our system and changing the passwords.

Happily (hopefully) no real harm was done.

But what if there had been? How safe is your station from hackers? What would be the worst case scenarios. Has anything like this happened to you or your station? What was the outcome?

What are the steps we could/should all take to prevent the hack?