Shortly before the current editors — myself, Constance Boozer and Eve Binder — took over the HMS IvyGate last autumn, the site suffered a serious breach of security. As a result, during the month of October, IvyGate struggled with malware issues that caused an automatic security warning to be shown to anyone trying to access the site. We purged the pernicious files that were triggering the warning, made some security adjustments, and assumed that the issue was resolved. And for a while it was.

However, Google has placed our site behind a warning several times in the intervening months. This despite scant evidence that anything was actually wrong with IvyGate itself. The most recent such episode was last week. Our in-house tech wizard, Zachary Ozer, investigated the cause of the problem, discovered no actual malicious software embedded into the code of our site (read: it was Google’s fault, not ours) and has since eliminated the threat of any similar flare-ups in the future.

I can’t stress this enough: With the exception of one unfortunate moment in October 2010, IvyGate has been secure. Our visitors are not not not NOT at risk of malware attack by entering the site.

Update*: What you just read is intended in all seriousness. What follows is pure ruse.

Still, the experience left us scratching our heads. IvyGate was hacked in spite of a pretty airtight security apparatus. The attack was malicious. It was also accompanied by a cryptic email from the perpetrator – one laden with browbeating verbosity and expansive knowledge of the inner-workings of IvyGate. This person, it appears, had access to our email, and knew the identities of tipsters. In the weeks and months since, we’ve scoured available information, consulted with security professionals and worked tirelessly to identify the culprit. And finally, today, we can report success.

The person shall not be named here, except to say that it was a 20-year-old man, a matriculant at Yale; someone with code-word clearance at IvyGate and a flare for the theatrical. This is an internal matter, and we’re pursuing recourse through the proper legal channels. Needless to say, this has been a sour point in the history of the website, but we hope to move forward, bigger and better than before.

(OK, it was Alex Klein.)

* To reiterate, Editor-emeritus Alex Klein is a law-abiding citizen — unless it’s a crime to use the word “perspicacious” in a sentence. (We’re looking into it.) Alex is, in fact, quite the mensch, a certifiable broham, and a skilled writer and thespian to boot. Not the hacker type.

Happy April Fools.