An Important Message from the Centre:
Thank you all for your patience as we dealt with our website issues this weekend.
If you attempted to access the Centre website between Friday, Nov. 13 at 8:38 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 14 at 5 p.m., please read the following:
On Friday, November 13 at 8:38 p.m., the Centre’s website was accessed by a third party. These individuals exploited a vulnerability in one of the website’s plugins, which allowed them to get in and insert a redirect code. This meant that anybody attempting to access www.centreforautism.ab.ca during this timeframe was redirected to another website/URL, not affiliated with the Centre.
Our team became aware of this incident on Saturday, November 14 at 4:00 p.m. and the site was taken offline to resolve the issue.
Upon assessing this incident, the Centre’s web development/IT team concluded that the intent of this activity was to redirect users to the malicious site and NOT to access the Centre website’s user data, meaning your user information on the Centre website was not compromised. Please know that your payment information is NOT stored on the website and is NOT accessible, and your user passwords are encrypted and not accessible. We have been assured that this was not a cyber crime targeting the Centre specifically, it was a blanket attack that used this specific vulnerability across a multitude of websites on the internet across the world.
If you attempted to access the Centre’s website in this timeframe and were redirected to the malicious site, please do the following:
1. Fully clear your browser cache and history
2. Perform a precautionary malware scan on your device. If you do not have a malware scanner for your computer, our IT team recommends MalwareBytes (free download for Mac and Windows at https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/) or Sophos.
The Centre’s web team has resolved the issue and fully secured the site after a thorough assessment, scan and clean. We are back up and running.
Talk about Friday the 13th! If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
– The Centre Team
