Websites have a life like James Bond and apparently they get to live only twice. Visitors visit any site, for the first time out of curiosity, to see if there is anything interesting to browse. If they find anything that grabs their attention, they visit a second time to see if there is any new content added. If the site fails to impress at either of these two times it can bid goodbye to its visitors and there are ‘no comebacks’.
In the past few weeks (probably even earlier) my site has been hacked. Being aware of the high expectations of my visitors, I had been carrying out some desperate firefighting measures to bring my site back into shape. During this period my site has been acting weird and I couldn’t fix it as quickly as I wished and as a result I might have lost some valuable first or second time visitors who are never going to comeback.
Nevertheless I have learned several valuable lessons out of this painful experience which I would like to share with you and may help you if you maintain a site of your own.
Clues that your site has been hacked (it will bring out the inner Sherlock Holmes in you):
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* If you log into your account at your web host, you see your file size bloated without any reason. (Mine shot up from 35MB to something like 170MB)
* You will see some weird characters on some of your pages alongside normal ones like the one below pointed by the arrows
* If you display Google Adsense ads like I do, you will see a lot of Adsense Ads that are not relevant to your page’s content.
* You will see an unusually large number of hidden external links pointing to sites that serve hackers’ interests.
* You will see a very long list of random words hidden inside some of your pages and code and may take a little of digging to find where they are hidden. Again these are to serve hacker’s interests to place Google ads related to these random words instead of your site’s content.
* You will see some of the pictures missing in your page and if you hover your mouse pointer over it, they point to a location in an unknown folder and not in the folder you originally uploaded.
The cause of my problem:
1. I was using an earlier version of WordPress platform for maintaining the site which is known to be vulnerable to hacker attack
2. My password was not strong enough and could have been easily cracked.
Remedies:
1. If you are using a platform other than the older versions of WordPress (say FrontPage or Dreamweaver or Blogger), look into appropriate forums of webmasters to see any vulnerability of hacker attacks and implement necessary actions to improve security of your site.
2. But if you are using an older version of WordPress immediately upgrade it to a newer version. Also please implement every one of the following suggestions mentioned in the following links.
- http://webdesign.anmari.com/improve-your-wordpress-webs-security-prevention/
- http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/08/3-new-wordpress-security-tips-i-learnt-from-matt-cutts/
Before I let you go, I request you to stay with me or come back as often as you can and I promise I will not fail you.
Given your loyal support, I challenge the agents and the sentinels
determined to kill my spirit or destroy my ship ( taking cue from the movie Matrix) ,
“Try as you can, you cannot stop me. This Neo
will always rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”