Now you see them, now you don't … now you do?

Such was the fate last week of online press releases and testimonials touting Hannaford's use of Rapid7's flagship risk-management product. The relationship between the companies had become notable after news of the beleaguered grocer's data breach made major headlines.

The erasure of Hannaford from Rapid7's site was especially curious because Rapid7 was contending that Hannaford has cleared its product of any culpability in the breach. (Hannaford didn't return my calls.) Moreover, Rapid7 couldn't seem to settle on a single explanation — even with the CEO giving it his best shot — for what the company insisted was not an aborted PR purge.

Hannaford had long been a poster child for Rapid7's product, NeXpose, with numerous mentions on its site, all of which (save one) had gone missing as of last Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, a company spokesman told me the Hannaford deletions were in response to a direct request from the grocery chain.

A few hours later, as though by magic, all the Hannaford stuff reappeared on the Rapid7 site … and the fun really began to pick up.

On my second call, I got a different Rapid7 marketing guy who told a completely different story. He said the Hannaford materials were taken off the Web site in response to a massive traffic spike that had hampered customer downloads.

Sounded unlikely, so I tried CEO Alan Matthews, who said the decision to remove the Hannaford materials from his company's Web site was made in tandem by his marketing and network people after news of the Hannaford data breach hit the fan. So far, so good. Less clear was why they did it, and Matthews was of limited help in explaining the various discrepancies.

Regarding Explanation No. 1, namely that Hannaford requested the materials be taken down, he said: "There may have been a discussion about it (between his people and Hannaford), but I'm not sure who actually suggested it or requested it. We may have suggested that we'd done it already and they may have said that's fine."

The first Rapid7 spokesman had been unequivocal in saying that Hannaford requested the purge.

Regarding Explanation No. 2, namely that traffic spike, Matthews said: "When the Hannaford breach was announced, the person who normally administers our Web site thought, 'OK, we should take the press release down,' and he took it down. Because the page went 404, he decided that he would take all Hannaford stuff down. There was a lot of network traffic, although I think (the person who gave me Explanation No. 2) was kind of just making that up as to what happened."