I experienced downtime on my website and it was almost 12 hours before it came back up… I had called up my service provider and I couldn’t get anyone to help me until this morning at 6am GMT. I called up last night around 6pm and waited an hour on the phone to speak to someone who wasn’t able to help.
It was extremely frustrating to be out for so long after getting hacked last week. Eventually, I found out that what the problem was, it was another attempted hack attempt but the hacker made a bad attempt and messed up.
Anyway, I had already patched up Wordpress to the latest version so I was thinking that I may have some reminents of some files sitting on my web server. Indeed, there were a couple of suspect files which I had found and removed. In addition, I found out that there is a security hole in the Wordspew Chat plugin which I had previously installed. I saw a mentions to this plugin when I looked at my logs so I think this is how they got in… I have removed this now.
However, I have been looking on the web about hacked website and Wordpress site hacks seems quite prevalent! The price of a growing website is the visibility it has to the people and the more popular it becomes, the more hackers feel the need to take you down. It is frustrating, of course, and you have to keep vigilant. Luckily for me, the hacks have been fixable but in other cases, people have had their whole databases and files destroyed.
Anyway, I read about this chap where a hacker not only hacked his website but also his email and then took control of his domain and transferred it. Then the hacker demanded money. Anyway, there’s a happy ending but it’s an interesting read! See below:
