BPN Outage

Dear Photographers,

BPN has just been reactivated after its longest outage in its history. BPN was victim of 2 specific events that lead to the outage.
The first was the continued attacks on BPN software and services that caused other sites to experience phishing. As a result, a request was issued to our domain hoster to shut down the birdphotographers.net domain. The domain was deactivated on the 29th of June.
After cleaning up all infected files on our hosting site, we requested reactivation. However, our domainname was still registered towards the old administrator of BPN. When BPN was handed over to the current administration, the old administrator was requested to confirm the transfer, but never did. Hence the old domain registration email was never changed and when the 'adminstrator' was asked to confirm the activation, we never got the mail to respond.

This event caused the longest outage as it was very difficult to communicate to the domain hoster (via chat only) and it was not clear how we could transfer full ownership (i.e. remove and change the old administrator email address). Last night (8 July) BIRDS AS ART staff and owner Arthur Morris handed me the necessary documents to be handed over to the domain registrar.
And this morning I discovered we are back online !! Great news and a big relief.

We will take further actions to prevent this from happening again and if all goes well, you, the BPN community, will not notice the change.

Finally, we recognise that you have been deprived of BPN's services: we have decided to extend all BPN Members (paying members) to extend their membership expiration with one month.
I hope to be able to complete this before the end of July: it requires some direct editing of database fields and records, not a trivial task.

With kind regards and happy snapping,

The Admin Team