therese
Posts: 6
Joined: 09 Mar 09
Trust:
10 Mar 09 7:42 pm
Hi,
Last fall one of my sites was hijacked. When I went to the website, there was a lovely coffin with RIP (Rest In Peace) and a lot of garbage on the page. They took everything. Fortunately, this was one of several sites that I hadn't fooled with for a while.
They do it for "laughs", they think it's funny and they do it to leave "back door" entrances so later on they can do other things to your sites - like destructive viruses, malware (I think that's what it's called), spyware.
It happened again in December (I thought I did everything right the first time, but maybe not) and I lost two more sites and went through the process of changing everything. I received an email from my hosting company saying they were putting new "security" procedures in place.
My hosting company told me they come in through Word Press. That you have to make sure all your permissions are changed back to 666 (don't quote me on the 666 because I'm not for sure). They told me to upgrade my Word Press everytime a new update becomes available and make sure I changed my FTP passwords frequently. I also had to go through file and delete htaaccess if they were in my sites.
Hopefully, this will be the last. I had to download (it was free) a software that was specific to one of the viruses they planted. Which I did and ran all kinds of scans to make sure everything is ok.
It's a lot of trouble, you feel vulnerable and if they had been "money making" sites I don't know what I would have done.
Anyway, I hope no one else has to go through anything like this.
Therese
