HACKED and hacked off!

[Aitch]

Hi everyone.

I guess it’s always a possibility that some loner sitting in his bedroom wearing nothing but his filthy y-fronts, is one day going to target your website when he stumbles across it in his isolated and desperate search for virtual recognition!

I couldn’t believe it when I went to open my website 3 days ago and nothing was there. Oh, the file was there alright but it was gutted of all content. I opened the index.php in Dreamweaver and sure enough, there wasn’t even a page title left. Not a tag, not a line of anything, zero, zilch, diddlysquat!!!

I had backups of course and my hosting company also backs up bi-weekly, so the worse case scenario is just a few days lost data and inconvenience to ole webby and his visitors.

Once I got back up and running, I got hacked again (yesterday). This time more subtly. The dropdown menu didn’t drop down anymore. I opened the file and guess what? The code for the drop down had been removed. Also the Most Recently Added apartments tables were not updating. This was a bit more difficult to fix!!

Dam hackers! But quite sad really. I mean, I hardly have a controversial site and there’s no inconvenience to tens of thousands of hungry home seekers, so why Mr. Roomfinder? Could be personal I s’pose!

The hosting company said there was no calling card left by the hacker which is quite unusual. This would probably mean someone has full logon details and simply sneaks in and strips bits of code out of popular pages before making a quick exit.

Anyway, the reason for writing the post is to see if anyone else has been hacked at anytime and what measures did they take to prevent it from happening again (if that’s possible!)

Cheers

Aitch

[Yaro]

I've been hacked before but like your host said they usually leave a calling card.

Another reason to always be on top of your backups...I might go do that now.

[Carlos]

Thats a terrible experience, Aitch. It's never happened to me, probably because none of my sites have tons of exposure right now. I guess I should find out how to back up my MySql databases in case they were ever deleted, although I'm assuming my hosting company does that as well.

[Aitch]

Originally posted by Carlos@Feb 21 2006, 12:04 PM
I guess I should find out how to back up my MySql databases in case they were ever deleted, although I'm assuming my hosting company does that as well.

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That's right Carlos, or at least they should do. You can always send them a quick mail to confirm this and the frequency they backup.

My lot backup bi-weekly and I also backup my end but not as regular as the hosting company. It can take a few hours depending on the size of your site.

I also have an option to just backup my database via a simple link located in CMS (Central Management System - I think!) As I’m not always doing format and layout changes to new and existing pages, it's only necessary to backup the database on many occasions.

Cheers

Aitch

[Rhett]

copyscape.com is a good one to search if anyone has duplicated your original content.

[Aitch]

Originally posted by Rhett@Feb 21 2006, 02:34 PM
copyscape.com is a good one to search if anyone has duplicated your original content.

Thanks for that Rhett.

What a great little resource. I'd never heard of that before.

I've done a check and no duplicates anywhere according to their SW.

My hacker was just deleting code from pages. Hopefully he/she's moved on to bigger fish now. Actually, I should probably have said "hopefully, the hacker has realised the error of his ways and has stopped hacking altogether"

Aitch

I was hacked just a week or two ago. They replaced a lot of my images with anti-Semite propaganda. It was quite weird considering I'm not Jewish.