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16+1 lessons I learned from my hacked blog

LGR Hacked

LGR Hacked

A few days ago, Stratos’ Sphere was hacked, or “defaced”. I’m guessing that’s what it was, because the attached image was what visitors would see, instead of my blog. This was quite ironic, actually, since I had just attended a security seminar (at work) where the “I’m safe because I’m small” attitude was found to be one of the most frequent reasons leading to hacked sites.

Here’s my account of what I had done wrong to end up with a hacked blog and what I did wrong while trying to recover, which may help others to avoid this situation or to make a faster and easier comeback.

To set the premise, let me point out that my blog is self-hosted and that I’m using a shared hosting service. I have my own domain name and I’m using cpanel in order to manage the hosted domain. So, what are the lessons I’ve learned?

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Thank God for hackers!

LGR Hacked

Yesterday, Stratos’ Sphere was hacked by “TEAM HAXORSISTZ”.

The attack was in itself quite harmless, meaning that only the front page was altered. However, this was a very useful wake-up call which came not a day too soon.

You see, I have great plans for Stratos’ Sphere and thank God for Kratos, Netcat, TSDD Uncut and Master Mind, the fine lads from Bangladesh who reminded me just how important security is and how naive it is to just lay there in our false sense of safety. I dare not think what might have happened if a black-hat-hacker (cracker) had had a go at this blog, unprotected as it was, after it had grown substantially a few months down the road.

After everything was restored, I took some extra steps, as a lesson learned from this, which I’ll present in an upcoming post. So, thanks guys, I owe you one.

PS1: Yes, about one month’s worth of posts were (almost) lost, but that was my fault. It will all come back in the next few days. More on that on the next post!

PS2: Clever! Hack+Exorsists=”Haxorsistz”

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I’m currently trying out the livefyre comment management system, but it’s taking loads and loads of time for its first time run – particulartly to import all pre-existing comments. New comments are possible, older comments will appear when the process is complete. Sorry about that.

Upd: Now fixed!

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