I've been hacked!
Monday, October 06, 2008
Yesterday morning I was alerted to a hacking incident on this site that was pretty serious. The administrator function of the site had been broken into, which basically allowed anyone to make changes to various pages on Gen-X Rising. Predictably, someone started putting links to very nasty websites on my 'About Andrew' and 'UM Reporter Columns' page.
My webmaster was able to determine that the problem was with our web hosting company (not Blogger). We made some changes to tighten up security and cleaned out all the trash.
If you were navigating around the site over the past couple of days and came across any of this stuff, I sincerely apologize. And for the person who first alerted me to it, I want to say thank you. Fellow bloggers, let my experience serve as a warning to you. I rarely visit pages on Gen-X Rising like the 'About Andrew' page, so if no one had alerted me, my site could have been infected for days on end.
For right now, the pages that the options on the left-hand sidebar link to have been cleaned out. I'll be re-adding information to them over the coming days. The one piece of good news is that this is allowing me to do some updating to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages that I've wanted to do for some time - basically, inputting all the columns I've written, sorted by year.
If other bloggers have experience with hacking incidents and could offer helpful preventative advice to the readers of this site and myself, feel free to share.
My webmaster was able to determine that the problem was with our web hosting company (not Blogger). We made some changes to tighten up security and cleaned out all the trash.
If you were navigating around the site over the past couple of days and came across any of this stuff, I sincerely apologize. And for the person who first alerted me to it, I want to say thank you. Fellow bloggers, let my experience serve as a warning to you. I rarely visit pages on Gen-X Rising like the 'About Andrew' page, so if no one had alerted me, my site could have been infected for days on end.
For right now, the pages that the options on the left-hand sidebar link to have been cleaned out. I'll be re-adding information to them over the coming days. The one piece of good news is that this is allowing me to do some updating to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages that I've wanted to do for some time - basically, inputting all the columns I've written, sorted by year.
If other bloggers have experience with hacking incidents and could offer helpful preventative advice to the readers of this site and myself, feel free to share.
Labels: Blog housekeeping
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 11:27 AM
3 Comments:
From the looks your operating on a windows machine? You may want to think about switching to a Linux based provider as patches are released quicker in Linux than Windows.
Hacker Forums
Bishop Willimon's blog was hacked into about a year and a half ago and someone posted a fake blog post. Had to contact blogger and regain the blog with a new password...
It is good to read the truth "about Andrew." Glad to read that you've been restored!
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