About that Malware Post...

Hello, readers, and happy Saturday!

We're usually pretty mum on the weekends, but we thought we owed it to you—and the other bloggers who linked to our original post—to give a few more details about the malware scare.

At around noon yesterday, a reader and friend of Phillyist received a company-wide email from his office's IT department stating that the firm's network had been corrupted by malware that had been traced to Philly.com. Our tipster shared this information on the condition of anonymity, as the memo was marked confidential.

While a full story on something of this nature this would require a good amount of research, we felt that passing the information along as a quick, headless post, stating that the tip was exactly that, was still important. We did this for one big reason: the traffic on Phillyist is at its highest between noon and 1:30 p.m., and our daily news post—which linked exclusively to stories on Philly.com—was still prominently displayed on our homepage. Directing our readers to a site that even had the potential for infecting their computers without warning them of the risk was not something we wanted to do. This is not a case of being irresponsible or lazy bloggers making unsubstantiated claims—we leave that to this guy—it was a case of wanting to protect our readers.

As promised, we kept the post updated as we received any new information, and every time we pushed an update, we also moved the post to the top of our page. Over the course of the day, we were in touch with Wendy Warren, who edits Philly.com. Updates were mutual, and at the end of the day, she forwarded us an official statement on the situation, which we posted to Phillyist within half an hour. Although the statement neither confirmed nor denied the malware rumor, Ms. Warren's statement made it clear that Philly.com's administrators felt that the site was, by that point in time, safe.

All of which is to say, simply, we're sorry if we caused anyone to panic about the possibility of malware on Philly.com (although five re-tweets hardly counts as panic-worthy), but we thought it was important that we inform our readers of a potentially bad situation before things could get worse. We're happy to say that we are currently on Philly.com and things are working just fine for us. If we hear anything else from our tipster about the situation at his office, we'll be sure to let you know.

Image Credit: Flickr user Sophos D/A/CH Presseinfo.