You may have noticed that I've been offline for a couple days. Actually, it's more like a day and a half, but it feels like longer. Here's the long and short of the situation. One of the sites that I donate hosting to was compromised. This triggered numerous flags and Bluehost shut all the sites I'm hosting down, including this one.
The hack was quickly identified and eventually removed.
Bluehost was very frustrating at times because all they tell you is that *there's malware. *
That's it.
They shut you down and don't even give you a direction to go in. In fairness, this is a basically a dedicated server and they only physically manage the hardware. The rest is up to the IT guy. In this case, the IT guy is me.
After hours of frustrating phone calls, battling with *permissions problems*, and a few sessions of beating my head into the wall, I taught myself to use SSH. I don't even remember what that stands for but it's basically accessing the server via command line with root access, and cleaning everything out.
About halfway through the day today, they finally re-scanned the server and confirmed everything was spic-n-span.. That allowed them to release my server back into the wild.
I can say that measures have been taken to prevent this from happening again.
The world is full of assholes and some of those assholes have nothing better to do then hack people's websites. They cause nothing but grief, headaches and loss, all of which I experienced.
Thankfully, all is back to normal. Actually, it's better than normal and running buttery smooth.
Anyway, that's what's been going on.
If you're a blog owner or run some other WordPress based site, here's some free advice:
- Always keep your site up to date (themes, plugins and WordPress itself)
- Employ stringent security software like Wordfence and learn how to use it
- Always have some form of redundancy or backup system in place
