Last Thursday Google sent us an email that our site had been classified as having “malware” on it. If you tried to visit us you undoubtedly experienced a Malware Warning in your web browser and thought, “I’m not going there.” I wouldn’t either and we shut it down immediately.
Springing in to action our team discovered that our site was compromised and that the hosting company where our site resides had been infiltrated. Hundreds of sites were hit in exactly the same way by malware inserted. Its intent was to redirect your web browser to sites selling stuff. Pretty benign and stupid as a malware hack, but the havoc it wreaked upon so many businesses stunned even me, a long-time information technology person.
We immediately took our site offline and completely rebuilt it over the weekend. Fortunately we were able to salvage all of our data (including your Member information) and it only took us about 45 hours to bring everything back and end up with a site that is now probably ridiculously secure. We resubmitted it to Google for review and they “spidered” our site and gave it a clean bill of health yesterday afternoon.
You may be wondering, “Hey! What about my password or credit card information I’ve submitted on your site?” I need to be crystal clear that at no time was your information exposed and, in fact, I should probably explain these two points in some detail:
1) Your password is stored in our site database in an encrypted fashion and no one can see it, even us. The only thing we can do is create a NEW password, send it to you and then you can log in and immediately change your password by clicking “Your Profile” and putting in a new one making it, once again, known only to you
2) Your credit card information is never stored by us and our “payment gateway” (Authorize.net) and merchant bank (Wells Fargo) will not allow local storage or viewing of your sensitive data. In addition, we’ve always used Secure Socket Layer (SSL) (with a signed certificate from the issuing authority so you know it’s trendcurve.com you’re dealing with) that guarantees the credit card information leaving your computer and heading through the gateway to Wells Fargo over the internet is completely secure all the way.
We’ve now made the investment to significantly increase security so you can continue to be confident in browsing The Trend Curve site and doing online business with us starting now.
As always, thank you for your business and for your patience!