Posts Tagged ‘cyber attack’

IMPORTANT!!!! You NEED To Back Up Your Blog

• Lesson I learned THE HARD WAY…BACK UP YOUR BLOG.  My blog was hacked and completely down and frankly I wasn’t sure how the heck I was going to fix it!   New experience…never been hacked before and hope it never happens again.

• Obviously we worked out the kinks and the blog is now back up and running, but there was some definite panic when I paid a visit to my site only to see a huge banner on the front of it “tagged” this site has been hacked…with a logo!  The person who hacked the site, has their own logo saying they hacked it along with proud link to their website and blog…. Are you kidding me!

• Thank goodness, WordPress had an upgrade and this is what I did to get our site back up and figured I would share in the event this “special” person/bot pays a visit to your site.

1. I upgraded our WordPress because there was a new release available.   This is one of the many reasons I LOVE HOSTGATORS!!  Hostgators makes everything so easy and automated.  I went to Fantastico, clicked on WordPress, it showed there was an upgrade available, I click it and upgraded.  It automatically created a back up for me as well…which is highly recommended.
2. I found that most hackers attack your wp-blog-header.php, which I checked and nothing obvious there.  I am no “technical wizard” so if there was something there, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway….probably the case!
3. I read that you should immediately change your user name and password as the friendly hacker who tagged your site may have created an additional account as well, which is what happened in my site.
4. Make sure to check your User Administrator Accounts.  My friendly hacker, was kind enough to set up his own administrator account.  Wasn’t that nice of him???  Delete the user account immediately…obviously.
5. I then went to my handy dandy “artisteer” program, which I ABSOLUTELY LOVE for creating my own templates and exported a new template thinking that if the hacker did something in the CSS or the HTML template file, deleting the old and replacing with a new one may do the trick!  It worked and it only took about five minutes because the program is so easy to use!
   

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