Marketing Merge Network - Internet Marketing for Network Marketers

Hi everyone,

We had an issue with the system on the 15th and had to back up part of the database to the 8th.

You can continue referring prospects and using the system as usual. 

However, any changes you made to your system between May 8th and the 17th might need to be done again. 

Did you do any of the following between the 8th and the 17th?

• Update or Edit your profile area in any way,
• Change your username or password,
• Change or add new text on your personal site.

Remember, this only affects changes you may have made between the 8th and 17th.

Any changes you made before the 8th or after the 17th should not be affected in any way.

Note that if you loaded photos into your system between the 8th and the 17th we still have them but they may not appear for you yet.  We should be able to correct this within the next few days without you having to reload your photos.

While we were working on the problem for a few hours on the 15th we had to make a decision to either turn off the lead capture pages or direct all leads into one account so they weren't lost completely.

We decided to let prospects come in during that time so they weren't lost completely.  So there were some referrals that came in on the 15th that were forwarded into my account. 

It is very important to us that these end up with the right referrer. 

We have been calling and emailing these prospects to determine their proper referrer (a huge job).  There were just under 100 affected but we have  been able to confirm 81 of these and have placed them to the proper referrer.

There are now about 20 remaining that we have not been able to personally reach yet, and we will continue following up with them.

In the case where a prospect does not know their referrer we ask a number of questions to back-track to where they may have found the referrer on the Internet. 

• We ask how they learned about the University
• (If they don't know) We ask if they did a Google Search. 
• We ask where else they may have been that led them to the University originally (facebook, squidoo, etc)
• Did they see a picture along the way.
• Was it a man or woman. 
• Did they come across an article, video or blog (etc). 

So far we've been able to confirm the correct referrer through this process with the prospects we have reached.  Although it has been extremely time consuming we feel it is very important to do all we can (of course).

Remember, this only affected leads that were coming in while we were responding to the problem for a few hours on the 15th.  Any leads that came in before and after the 15th were awarded to the proper referrer as usual... and everything is working properly right now.

Basically, what happened was that a hacker had inserted a script through a lead capture form that scrambled all the Member IDs.  All we had to do was back up the database to correct the issue.  But while we were backing up the database we had the choice of shutting everything down, or to allow leads to continue to come in through the main account, which was not affected. 

We decided to let leads in so prospects that came in during this time were not completely lost.  Once the database was backed up, everything was back to normal later that same day (the 15th).

There may still be a few areas in the system that aren't working properly because they may have been impacted by the security we have added to prevent this from happening again.

We are correcting these areas as we find them. 

You'll know if you come across this because you'll be forwarded back to the Marketing Merge login page (such as when you're trying to submit something or change something in your system). 

If you see this please email us so we can correct it.  We expect everything will be corrected within a few days or sooner.

Other than this, everything is back to normal but we have tons of work to do to play catch up so please try to minimize the emails to support at this time until we are caught up.   Of course, if it's important go ahead and contact us but we are going to be back logged for a few days.  Please don't email twice on the same issue.  We're doing all we can to get caught back up.

If you were one of the people affected by this (if you made changes to your account for example between the 8th and the 17th and have to do those again) we're REALLY sorry about the inconvenience. 

Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to have slowed anyone down.  We're seeing more leads come into the system than ever! 

We're 100% committed to making this the best 'attraction marketing' training and support system available to build your business in the modern age.  We're accepting this as a growing pain and are moving forward full-steam ahead. 

Partners in success,

Mike Klingler