From the archive (2009): Hack update, backup saves 93% of hacked URLs
The day after the June 2009 attack: 2,188,978 links had been edited, 93% were restored from backup, 161,232 were not. The numbers, as the founder published them.
From the archive. This post appeared on blog.cli.gs on 16 June 2009, written by Pierre Far, who founded and ran the Cligs URL shortener. We publish an excerpt here because the original address is still linked from around the web; the complete original is preserved in the Wayback Machine. A note from today follows the excerpt. The background is in cli.gs, 2008 to 2026.
Most important thing: your passwords are safe. They are stored encrypted and were never at risk in this attack.
More numbers because, well, we like analytics like this (it's kinda the purpose of Cligs): 2,188,978 URLs were edited in the attack. Of those, 2,180,484 have not been deleted or disabled. Of those, only 161,232 are not in the backup. That's only 7% of the affected URLs. Of these 161 thousand, 95,123 (59%) are not associated with a specific user account. Those are really lost forever, and will change them to redirect to the Cligs home page. Of the 161 thousand that are associated with user accounts, only 2,268 user accounts are affected.
I'm using this opportunity to move to the new Cligs system as it's pretty much ready. As we speak and since last night, the data is being imported into the new database. All told, we'll be on the brand new system with all the data by the weekend.
What happened next
The 95,123 links that pointed at the home page from then on are a small irony: seventeen years later, Google was still crawling thousands of dead cli.gs short links, and the first thing the new cli.gs did with them was, again, to send them to the home page. In 2026 we replaced that with topic-based redirects, and this blog post is part of the same effort. The whole story: cli.gs, 2008 to 2026.