(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Back in the day, website hacks were either pranks, where the hacker would simply leave a calling card, or outright criminal activity targeting large corporations. We should have it so good. Nowadays, hacking seems to be just vandalism, plain and simple. Boring. And frustrating when it hits close to home. For example, Heather and I have been cooking up some web magic on the back channel over the last couple months. So when Heather Got Hacked, it messed with our collaboration timeline. And that’s… annoying.

Let’s hear what Heather has to say about it.

An unwelcome visitor

-by Heather Craik

My blog isn’t a big one. I’m not a ‘Problogger’ and I don’t have hundreds and hundreds of followers. My traffic isn’t even terribly great at the moment. One thing I do have, though, is a hacker.

As far as “perks,” having a hacker is one I could do without!

When I noticed what had happened the first thing I did was nudge Dave, who (after helping me out a little) asked if I’d come and share my story with you. Morals of the story can come later, but there’s one thing I’d like you to keep in mind as you read through. This could happen to you too.

Without further ado lets travel back a bit to the morning before I discovered my unwanted visitor… (Grab yourself a coffee or something, this is going to be a long one)

It began with a feeling…

The day started a little later than normal but not in any particularly remarkable way (unless sleeping late is considered remarkable?), and I went through normal morning routine stuff. Won’t bore you with the details there, we all have our own methods. Sat down and did some work offline; writing with actual pen and paper followed by planning my day. Checked emails, checked blogs, commented a few times.

That’s when I saw the first sign. In fact no, if I’m being totally honest, I’d wondered about this ‘first sign’ the day before as well but hadn’t had the time to check into it. CommentLuv was showing ‘No last posts to return’. To my shame, I didn’t instantly check in on my blog. I went around CommentLuv’s site first, got to the troubleshooter part, and arrived at my own blog in a very circular fashion. Now it’s worth pointing out that I’d known it was showing blank the day before since someone else had pointed it out to me. I’d dutifully gone and checked, had a look in cPanel at the files, and concluded that it was probably the server (I was very distracted at the time).

Already the dread was creeping in. I could feel there was something wrong.

Doubt had curled its insidious fingers around my brain, doubt which was only compounded when I tried to access my WordPress Dashboard and was met with the same blank page.

I looked further into my file system with my heart hammering, checked the main page (it was still working) and tried my blog again in a desperate attempt to deny what was happening to me. No dice – apparently circumstances don’t change if you deny them long enough and wish for it all to be ok. Drilled further down and was met with a very empty contents folder.

Now imagine this for a second: your blog is down, you’ve exhausted all the ‘Oh, its just the server’ excuses you could. You have even visited your host’s website to see if they were also having problems. You’ve checked further into it, and suddenly, everything you’ve been working on since the very start of your online blog life has simply disappeared.

“Sickening” doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.

Some anonymous piece of [well, you get the idea] has come in while you weren’t looking and brutally murdered your brainchild.

Still not quite giving up hope, imagine you looked at the code in the index.php file (I’m not very code-y by the way, I just know that it’s the main file and for the purposes of this example you do too) and were met with this:

Silence is Golden hack

“Silence is Golden”

Wouldn’t you feel like someone had punched you in the gut?

I know I did. Or stabbed, or slapped, or whatever violent unpleasant reaction you want to add here. Not only did they kill off my poor, innocent little baby blog but they left a calling card stating that it wasn’t any good in the first place.

Upset? Yes. Angry? Oh you bet. Confused and Stunned? I’m sure it was in there somewhere under the angry.

And continued in confidence…

My first reaction was to pace around my room threatening random inanimate objects. My next? To play video games.

Thankfully I’d at least backed up this month; though it was 20 days ago now. However, as you just read, that didn’t occur to me at the time.

Getting hacked was the last thing I needed to be doing. This particular disaster happened to come right in the middle of a frenzy of college work. I had a full day ahead of me filled with 3D project work and editing. Discovering something like this really shouldn’t have put my whole day on hold, and it was most definitely something that would have been better happening a week or two later (or not at all for that matter). What can I say? It’s easy to get to me apparently, and I shamelessly wasted a few hours on some random fast-paced game that didn’t require me to think.

After, that is, trying to reach a few different people (Dave included) for help and finding that everyone was offline, asleep, or busy.

Video games seemed like a great idea at that point.

Eventually, I calmed down and went out to college for part of the evening to do some work. Got back home not long after since I can’t really work on much in college itself at the moment and took another look at it. Backups were downloading when Dave showed up, and between us we figured out they’d gained access through a tiny permission I had set to allow people to register with my site. Aside from not doing that again, all that remained to do was restore the backup and re-post everything since that time.

To the wrong conclusion

From here on out it looked like there would be one simple solution, after which I could spend some time re-posting a few different articles and it’d all return to normal pretty quickly. The backup was loaded; after five attempts. Thinking that was it fixed, I double checked my blog – just to see that it was there before I started restoring everything else.

Nothing. The backups I’d done through cPanel that had been labelled as ‘Full Site Backups’ were, in fact, nowhere near complete. I would have needed another, more specific, backup of my database itself. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the plug-ins I’d been using for that had worked however they’d gone on the fritz a few days ago and I hadn’t fixed it yet. Further, I still couldn’t even get into my dashboard.

In short, I had no backup.

By this point you could be forgiven for assuming I lost it completely, ran around destroying things like a crazy person, or at the very least shed a tear (earlier in the day had caused a few after all). On the contrary…

…I felt distinctly apathetic.

Sure, I had all my posts in their original form minus formatting. There was always the option to reinstall WordPress itself and build it again from the ground up.

What was the point though? All the comments and discussions we’d shared before were history, even if I were to post the same things again there wouldn’t be that level of engagement; it’s now old news. I decided to sleep on it, do something unrelated for a while.

Admit defeat for the night.

[To be continued...

Meantime, have you had the "Silence is golden" attack? Or something worse?]

Heather writes The 3D Student providing video tutorials, reviews, and advice for 3D students. She loves working with light and texture for animation and modeling, writing, drawing, film and playing video games. Visit Heather at The 3D Student.