The other day the owner of one of the websites I designed, Love and Scandal Tea Company, sent me an email that almost made me have a heart attack!
Hi Aynex:
Looks like my beautiful website has been hacked. Any advice about how to fix that?
She sounded calm enough but I was freaking out. That has never happened to any website I have designed before. I went to her website and this is what I saw:
Oh the horror!
My heart stopped. I was envisioning a hostage rescue mission to recover the missing files very similar to Mission Impossible. Fixing the situation wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. A few calls to the web host and a few moves of files that thankfully I had backed up, fixed the situation. In a day or two, Love & Scandal Tea Company’s website was back to normal.
It turns out the website is created in WordPress. The version of WordPress and a few plug ins hadn’t been updated. The hackers got access to the site thru one of the plug ins.
Moral of the story: update all your plug ins and WordPress versions often. Whenever a new version is released, the latest security updates are installed and nightmares like this are less likely to happen.
My blog has been acting funny for the last 24 hours. I just updated everything and now seem to be back in business. I just needed a reminder to update. Thank you!
Just doing my part to keep our Internet working!
Wow very scary Aynex and a reminder to everyone to keep their sites updated. I had probably better start thinking about backing up my site also.
Thanks for the great reminder. I tell my workshop students to back up, back up and back up again, but often forget to do so myself.
I have a WordPress site and i just backed it up
Thanks, Aynex!
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