Compromised Website

ontheway

A friend did a site a few years ago for a guy. Recently the site was hacked. When my mate heard from the owner how it had be hacked, he thought "Ah Christ that's terrible", as he had nothing to do with the site since he finished it, and they were happy with it (at the time). Out of generousity he helped them clean up the mess that was made and then offered his professional services to find and patch the problem.

Then the guy gets all angro with him saying that the site was obviously not secure in the first place if such a thing could happen and demanded he fix it for free. My mate straight out refused on the grounds that these things can and do happen and that he was not been paid to perform maintenance on the site since he finished it a few years ago. Basically the guy wants my mate to assure him that his website will never be hacked again, for free!.

Do you think the guy is being fair? & What would you do if you were in my mate's situation?. It's not a case where the guy is threatening legal action (not yet anyway), but legally on what grounds can people stand on, considering you cannot completely eliminate risk when it comes to security. In this case my mate wasn't even been paid to manage the risk. He's quite upset over it because the guy has threatened to black'en his good name and when it comes to people who haven't a clue about these sort of things, all other people will hear..."Don't go near that fella, the websites he makes will be hacked within a matter of years", or some other ignorant BS.

I really feel sorry for my mate because I think in his line of work there are a large portion of customers availing of services they know nothing about and worse again, care to know nothing about, yet when things go wrong they freak out and start spouting all sorts of ignorance to their peers which does nothing for anyone. Don't get me wrong, but mate is just as capable of making a mistake as the next person, but I think in this case his reputation is being threatened on the back of ignorance.

EKRIUQ

Well that's pretty much the life of a web developer, when it comes to anything technical regarding a website most people know ZERO. All your mate can do is try to explain to him how websites work and unless they get security patches all websites are open to be hacked or maybe it's down to the hosting company security.

It's similar to other goods or services, their guaranteed for a period of time and after that the website owners are on their own. The owner of the website seems unreasonable so I'm not sure if there's any more point dealing with him and even if your friend did the work for free, he's probably gone as a cusromer.

mneylon

If you bought a car from a garage in the morning and never gave it an oil change or service would you be able to demand your moneyback in 3 years time?

D.W

This can happen to any site unfortunately. What your mate needs to do if he wants to help (even though its has 100% nothing to do with him) is explain to the site owner that this is part of life online and that there are very malicious sites/people out there that will use every trick in the book to further their own spammy sites inclusing scrapping and hacking sites.

The best bet then and I am assumming the site now has incurred a penalty with Google is to file a reinclusion request via Google webmaster tools explaining what he thinks has happened. No guarantees this will work but its a viable option at worst.

daymobrew

blacknight wrote: »

If you bought a car from a garage in the morning and never gave it an oil change or service would you be able to demand your moneyback in 3 years time?

With this logic in mind, would it appease the angry customer to suggest arbitration? It would demonstrate a willingness to deal with the issue - I am mainly thinking of preventing the name blackening.

Hopefully it would be favour of your mate.

D.W

daymobrew wrote: »

With this logic in mind, would it appease the angry customer to suggest arbitration? It would demonstrate a willingness to deal with the issue - I am mainly thinking of preventing the name blackening.

Hopefully it would be favour of your mate.

For me that would be almost an admission of guilt-which is certainly not the case.

kmick

Only one way to stand up to this - fight back. Your man just wants something for nothing. Tell your buddy to flatly refuse without payment. If you cave youll be doing free work for the rest of your life.

ontheway

Thank you all for your replies

I'm glad to see that my thinking on the subject is shared.

@daymobrew My mate is a good guy and constantly strives to exceed his customer's expectations. In this case I think it would be dangerous for him to express a hint of guilt for what has happened considering he has not let his previous client down in any way. Now of course his client's expectations are most certainly not being met in this case and that's purely because the client's expectations are extremely unreasonable.

So I suppose to a degree the ability for a professional to exceed their client's expectations is largely based on the assumption that the client's expectations will be reasonable in the first place and remain that way. Now that doesn't mean a professional should expect a client to aim low, but rather understand precisely what it is they are paying for and acknowledge that everything else is not being paid for.

daymobrew

ontheway wrote: »

@daymobrew My mate is a good guy and constantly strives to exceed his customer's expectations. In this case I think it would be dangerous for him to express a hint of guilt for what has happened considering he has not let his previous client down in any way.

You're right - I hadn't read the bit that he's already fixed the issue.
In that case - fight back.