You've seen that moment in a game after a shooter hits nothing on a shot. The crowd yells, "Airball! Airball!" It happens when you're marketing, too. It's probably happened to me with no one telling me, like if I led people to an article on a website with a major spelling error. Or if my website happened to be down at the exact moment someone accessed it (99.9% is not 100% uptime). But when your website is hacked with malware, that's a big problem, especially if you just opened your basketball camp up for summer signups.
That's what happened when I got a link to a summer basketball camp website. It came highly recommended by the kids' coach, but I showed up on the website and my AVG went nuts. Then I tested it out with Securi. Hacked! When I looked through the report, the malware had something to do with coin mining, but the intent doesn't really matter. If my AVG caught it, then other people got the same error. If some people didn't have AVG or other protection, then the website went and infected their computers. That's not a good way to get people to sign up for your basketball camp.
The owner did the right thing and shut the website down. Or the host did. Incapsula, which is supposed to be decent. It looks like an updated Wordpress website on an OK host with https, so I'm not sure what went wrong. Maybe too many add-ons or an easy-to-guess password. Sometimes, it's just other morons on the shared host. The point is that the big event was ruined. As I write this, the website is down as a suspended page. Probably all the new hits today caused the host to see the problem that had already been there. The semi-good news is that the website that handles scheduling is still available, so the owner can just send out a new MailChimp email and direct people to that.
Actually, it's a good reminder that you might want to link out somewhere else for payments and have your mailing lists taken care of by a third party. I can technically do all that with the websites I build, but then the website going down really ruins the party. In fact, I just finished recommending a church seek out its own donation site for taking money rather than have me install something. While I could have done it, I just don't want to be responsible for so many potential problems.
The lesson would be that before you send out that mass email, give your website a once-over. At least scan it with our friends at Securi. If you find a problem, see if I can help.