Surviving a hack | Hinesight....for Foresight

In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been quiet lately….my site was hacked. Basically, if you searched for pages on my site via Google, I would come up as selling viagra (including female viagra, being politically correct and all). It seemed like an annoying but fairly harmless fix, but my web guy was busy on other accounts, backups were not done properly, bluehost couldn’t help because my site had been customized, etc. etc. So maybe a warning to those with simple sites like mine to be sure you’re keeping up your site maintenance!

Anyhow, my friend and colleague Pam McConathy at Think Foresight recommended the good folks at Neos Marketing and they did a bang-up job in quickly responding to the situation. That was the good news. The bad news was that I had to re-post about 150 blog posts via cut-and-paste (yikes). But it’s done and the site is re-built. You may notice in google that there is still a “site may be compromised” warning — apparently it can take weeks to get that removed. But I assure you all is well and I’ll get back to the real business of this blog — the future. Andy Hines

About Andy Hines

Dr. Andy Hines is Program Coordinator at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He is also speaking, workshopping, and consulting through his firm Hinesight.

Before that, he was Managing Director of Social Technologies/Innovaro, and served as an Adjunct Professor with the university since 2004. Hines enjoyed earlier careers as a consulting and organizational futurist. He was a partner with Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He was also Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader at Dow Chemical with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities. Before that, Hines established and ran the Global Trends Program for the Kellogg Company.

Hines is motivated by a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful, and he believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today’s organizations and the world. His goal, he says, is to infect as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable in organizations.

In this pursuit, he has authored five books: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape (No Limits Publishing, 2011); Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007); 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997); and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994) and has another in the hands of publishers: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education. He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards’ Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for “An Audit for Organizational Futurists” and the 2008 award for “Scenarios: The State of the Art.” He has appeared on several radio and television programs, PBS Houston, KRIV-26 News, and the CBS “Early Show.” He also co-founded and is former Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists.

About Andy Hines

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