On Christmas morning I checked my email but got an error message – strange, but maybe not unusual since we’re high in the western highlands of Guatemala.  Tried a couple of hours later but the same error.  Hmmm…so I checked to see if our blog was OK and was shocked to see we’d been hacked with this ransomware message:

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This started a week into a world I didn’t know or understand, but I wasn’t going to pay a ransom! Christmas Day was a Sunday so I had to wait until Tuesday to reach my host provider.  They said our domain was hacked/ambushed but it appeared our data on the host server was still OK.  This is how the “whois” database looked like:

After working with the domain registrar, proving who I was and resetting DNS settings, slowly things came back to normal.

So if the Russians can control our US elections, Yahoo lost a billion accounts to hackers, and Trump says “any computer can be hacked”, what hope is there for our little blog?!

Happy New Year to all our friends and family!