The vicious work of a hacker or several hackers rendered Rifftides and all of the other artsjournal.com blogs inaccessible to most of you for the past four 
days. If you called up our web address, you were probably greeted with a red box containing a warning that if you continued, your computer would blow up, you would break out in a rash, your crops would fail and your dog would die. Or something like that. We were victims of a malware (malicious software) seige that took days to break.
ArtsJounal commander-in-chief Doug McLennan worked with Google in the laborious process of cleaning up the mess and getting us back in business. Go here to read Doug’s account of the ordeal, its cause, how it was solved and the web’s continuing malware danger. His piece appeared before the damage from the attack was repaired. It has a footnote announcing our return to action.