I got the scare of my www-life when I opened my browser to my blog’s main page and found an image of some sinister cloaked figure staring back at me. The page, as usual and in alignment with the inner selves of the hackers, sported a black background color and a guilty, sinister and pathetic low-esteem atmosphere.
I recall that I have browsed through a lot of pages elaborating on the importance of securing one’s blog from hackers. I have regretfully not taken these warnings very seriously as I thought that hackers would not probably take notice of my blog as, at the moment, it is small and only has a small readership (and thus un-important). Now, I realized that hackers, again consistent with their nature, do not have any sense of ‘values’, and so would devour anything, be it gold or garbage.
Some googling helped a lot in alleviating the problem. Within the hour, I was able to regain possesion of my wp dashboard. I entertained the idea that my host may have some weakness in their setup. My research returned a lot of complaints about Lunarpages being very unhelpful and apathetic to these kinds of problems saying that Lunarpages’ standard response is to say that security of websites are the responsibility of the blog owners and not theirs. When I wrote to Lunarpages about my experience, their support promptly responded with some advise on how to secure my blog from future attacks. Based on what I have experienced so far, I cannot right now blame Lunarpages to be at fault here as I do believe it is my fault that my site was hacked. My previous post had been about my cpu being attacked by some trojan or spyware (showing 100% cpu usage). I think the trojan had been spying on my activities and was able to retrieve the username and password to my blog.
I have just reformatted my desktop computer, and having had this first ‘hacked blogger’ experience, I am a little more cautious now with my surfing routines. I have also began to actively research on security measures I should take in order to prevent future hack attacks on my blog and my desktop. If you have experienced being hacked or you know some important security measures for hack-proofing your blogs, you may help shorten my research by suggesting it in the comments section. What did you do to protect your blogs? What plugins did you use? Are there certain files in my blog’s directories that I need to change, delete or watch out for after the attack?