(Previous Realtor.com coverage - Realtor.com Hacked Day 1 / Realtor.com Hacked Day 2)
At around 7 PM last night the Realtor.com Blog was taken offline. 17 hours later and counting, they are still down. The speculation is that a wordpress plugin was at fault, but that remains to be seen.
We are still scratching our heads over how nobody at Realtor.com noticed the hack in their RSS readers, why no action was taken when we notified them of the hack for over 36 hours and why securing the website and servers is taking 17 hours and counting.
Realtor.com is not a mom and pop shop, they take in millions from hard working Realtors and should be held to a higher standard. Have you ever seen Trulia, Zillow, Redfin or HomeGain down for 17 hours? Of course not.
Realtor.com has yet to release comment or respond to our request for comment.
Update: As of 2:30 PM, the site is back up minus the specific posts that had injected spam for a total downtime of around 19 hours. Wow. Still waiting for an official response from a Realtor.com spokesperson. My hope is that they do not fail to address the issue and communicate with the Realtor.com community and bloggers that use their service. Failure to make users aware of the circumstances involved with the hack (considering its anyone’s guess whether personal data was compromised) would be unfortunate for the Realtor.com blogging community.
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June 7th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Why let Realtor.com control your listings AND your blog? My blog has never been down for 36 hours…
June 7th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Move.com, those nice folks that operate Realtor.com for the NAR are not very good people to depend on to do things right.
Run your own blog independent of any you may have in places like Realtor.com and link from it.
June 7th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
That sounds like solid advice. I don’t know what the bigger story is, the hack or the fact that nobody noticed or seemed to care. BrokerScience was the only outlet that covered this. I really like their site, but I don’t like their lack of communication.