The site was bricked exactly 2 weeks ago by hackers who exploited a vulnerability in 2.x.x version of wordpress which was hosting my blog. While it was a complete hack affecting WordPress, fortunately they could not touch my the hosting platform. For almost 2 weeks the blog was far from a live blog, more a dead log.
The blog was defaced, the mysql database erased, the admin user IDs compromised and injected with new user Id / passwords left behind as back doors.
Fortunately, good practices always help on a gloomy day like this. A timely DB backup created in January of this year and stored on my local laptop came to the rescue.
A fresh installation of the new wordpress package, mysql database installation, configuration and backup restore took a good 48-60 hours of work. It was an effort as the new versions of wordpress are not supported on the servers of my hosting vendor. It was quite an effort to get it up and running by manually putting the pieces together.
Efforts were also required to hack the PHP code of some admin-modules which needed to change system settings, which are again (naturally) not allowed by the hosting partner I use.
Finally its back online, with a lot of learnings, a yet more rigorous backup schedule prescription, captcha implementation to keep the spammers away and a set of other security tools in the admin module to watch out for open vulnerabilities being exploited again.
Yes and I did write to the hacker who left behind his signature and his email ID. Well there is no response nor any more hack attempts. So apparently this “famous” hacker group is nothing more than a collection of hacking-script happy killjoy individuals who have nothing more to do with their lives than run stupid scripts on unsuspecting blog users on the net. It’s more dreadful than a backup admin whose joy in life would at least be the conviction that its for a good cause. To them if they come visiting again, I only say “dudes grow up and get a life, make your parents and girlfriends proud” 😉
