The severity and mystery of this incident really has shocked every member of the 3DTotal team. It is way more serious than our data being remotely hacked as I shall begin to explain.

The in-house team consists of Myself Tom Greenway and my two colleagues Ben Barnes and Chris Perrins. Last week we were all away from the studio on a weeks vacation with friends, very few people knew we were away and little were we to know this was the beginning of some very serious problems. I was working on laptop, doing some emailing whilst away and on Friday 21st May I noticed strange things were happening with our server, emails accounts were disappearing and then the whole site seemed to go down. We put it down to a virus and as we were flying home soon we decided to leave things to fix until we got back.

It was when we returned to the studio we really discovered what had happened. People had actually been there whilst we were away, all computers files had been deleted from internal and external backup drives, then power leads to the hard dives and then snapped off (breaking the pins) and possibly worst of all, all of our back-up CDs had been covered in super glue to render them useless.

The site was stored and backed-up in 4 places, being the server, internal drives, external back-up drives and the CDs, each of these was attacked with the sole purpose of wiping out any record of 3DTotal, we so very nearly lost everything, our livelihoods, 5 years of hard work and of course one of the most popular CG sites on the net.

The good news next! We were not beaten!! as you can see, just a few days and not much sleep later we are back in full force!

There is a police investigation underway and we will post more news as it happens.

I would like to thank all the offers of help and messages of support that have come in, there is a forum thread here if anyone would like to make further comments.

Thanks everyone for your continued support during these difficult times.

Tom Greenway
3DTotal Editor

In the pictures below you can see how we managed to power back up the hard drives by soldering 4 paperclips onto the hard drives power connectors, this was the same with every computer in the studio.

Update 28th May 2004 : Additional information here : http://www.3dtotal.com/articles/sabotage_3dtotal/follow-up.asp