To my dear friends and followers,

It has been a long, hard and heartbreaking week. I have so much on my mind these days, as I am sure you all do as well. These crazy ever-changing times are full of crisis, fear and potential life threatening dangers.

As if Covid 19, social and economic injustice, and widespread ignorance and dissent were not enough, now I have to worry about protecting my blog and my work for scrupulous hackers and infiltrators. 

The last few days have been out of control for me. I have had all my hard work threatened and infiltrated and was scared to death that all would be lost. 

I am sad to report that my website was hacked by some filthy, no good and lowdown losers from the far east. Oh they were smart about it, as neither I, nor most of my visitors were still able to visit my blog with little to no issues. And they weren’t even after any personal information here on my site. They were more interested in grabbing my traffic of new visitors.

The gist of the issues, seemed to center around pointing my main website link on Google to a Japanese auto parts site. Go figure why an auto parts site would want to be known as the Alluring Bead Boutique. 

Secondarily, they had added some type of phishing link that led Google to catch the trouble nearly immediately. 

I was alerted to the issue on Monday night. And worked continuously with my web host support teams scan my site completely and remove any and all infected and affected files. 

You may have noticed all of this for a few days or maybe longer, and I would like to reiterate that no personal information from any of my sites was compromised.

But going forward, I would like to encourage all of you who are reading this, to reach out to me in the future if you have trouble reaching my site or notice anything unusual when you are here. 

I am ecstatic to report that everything is fine now and I can finally relax and get back to work, creating content for you all. 

I must say I have learned a valuable lesson. Even a small blog that doesn’t really even make a profit, can be a target and I can no longer take for granted that my hard work is safe. 

And I certainly want my friends, followers or customers to feel safe and secure about their privacy and information, when they visit and shop with me. 

Rest assured that I have taken all the necessary steps to further secure what I thought was a very secure sight and to insure that this issue never happens again. 

And that I will continue to fight tooth and nail to protect you and my work.