Update on June 25 Website Outage

Dear US Chess Member:

Yesterday, US Chess’ website was the victim of a malicious attack by an unknown actor. If you visited MSA, the forums, or other parts of our website, you might have been offered an opportunity to download a file posing as a Fritz download. If you attempted to install this file, please know that your system might be infected with a Trojan virus and you should take immediate action to remove it from your system.

Our distributed IT team, consisting of various tech consultants and internal staff, did a site scan and eliminated the threats that appeared. We do not believe that anyone’s personal data was breached during this attack.

As you know, we are in the middle of a much-needed upgrade to our information systems infrastructure and are just a couple weeks away from launching. While the full website upgrade is waiting until Phase 2 of the infrastructure project, we will be taking necessary steps to improve the integrity of our websites. We do not anticipate that this breach will derail the launch of our new membership database and its associated functions.

Thank you for your understanding. As a national organization, US Chess is among many that fall prey to malicious actors for reasons we don’t understand. We are working with our tech consultants to ensure that we have an environment that is secure and safe for our members and the chess community to visit.  

Best regards,

Carol Meyer
US Chess Executive Director