As with many companies that maintain a large database, Renderosity is often the target of hackers. We have monitoring in place that helps us identify possible illicit uses, threats or attempts to hack our site. This monitoring helps us stop intruders before our system can be compromised in most cases; however, this incident was a little different which caused a slight delay in our detection. By slight, I mean about 15 minutes, our tech guys and monitoring they’ve setup is rather sophisticated. The area of vulnerability was patched, and we have reviewed of our system to ensure your Renderosity visit isn’t inconvenienced again. Also, we have made a modification to our system to provide a new level of general security.

The redirect pages that we had seen did not try to install people computers; however, Norton and other anti-virus software (depending on the settings) would have given people intrusion warnings based on the fact that the redirect was going to a domain name other than renderosity.com. Of course, we always advocate frequent virus scans, and that’s a precaution members who were redirect may want to take.

Password changes are not really needed either. We have a duel layered encryption on them, but then again changing passwords regularly is always good….just like virus scans. So please feel free to take that additional security step if you’d like.

No, the high number of people online didn’t have anything to do with it. Renderosity has been increasing in traffic and in search engine crawlers. So that large number of people online (at 9255) that you noticed was because of Google and yahoo crawlers.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenience you all experienced yesterday, and I appreciate the support that so many of you have shown.  

For those of you who asked us to extend our coupon that ended yesterday, since the redirect interfered when you were trying to use it, we have extended this coupon for you. This 15% off coupon ($25 min) is extended to tomorrow night (Tuesday, the 15th) at 11:59 pm system time. Please make sure you copy the code (20100612B15P25) and paste it in the coupon box, and press the “Apply” button.

Thanks,
Jenifer