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Hacking a Website

leelee
Posts: 13
Joined: 03 Nov 08
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Hacking a Website

I just read an interesting newsletter that said their website had been hacked into. They are in the process now of rebuilding their sites. Their web host indicated the problem was caused by Frontpage not being secure.

My question is what purpose is there to hacking into a webpage? What is the benefit to the hacker? And how concerned should I be on a daily basis about being hacked?

Lee
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therese
Posts: 6
Joined: 09 Mar 09
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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
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leelee
Posts: 13
Joined: 03 Nov 08
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Wow that is a nightmare. I have a problem right now. I had an outsourcer create a wordpress site on my host. He set it so the site information was emailed to him. I had to let him go for other reasons including fraud.

I changed all the passwords and made sure all the places that asked for email were mine. But today I created an add on domain to the original and I did not get a set up email. Which makes me think somehow he is still getting them.

Should I get a set up email from my host everytime I set up a new domain there?
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jasondodd
Posts: 752
Joined: 08 Feb 09
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ive heard that wordpress hacking can be an issue with earlier versions but if you're running versions 2.6 or later you should be fine. its also a good reminder to run a backup on your site - wordpress has some great backup plugins with some offering the option of having it automatically emailed to you every day/week
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This topic was started on Jan 01, 2009 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.