My Blog Was Violated: A Blogging Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, as in today, my friend Leslie e-mailed me to let me know my blog was hacked, and I don’t mean just a few files here and there like last time. Though I took a screenshot, I will not post it here for the hacker’s benefit. I’ll just say that it featured a photo of an eagle’s head with the Jordanian flag superimposed on it and accompanied by the worst Sousa-type march ever. Don’t you just love sites that automatically play music?

Brian Googled the hacker’s e-mail address, which s/he arrogantly included on my “new” site. It turns out this person has hacked many, many sites and is a network administrator, of all things.

As many of you know, I immediately posted to both Twitter and Facebook about this and I extend my thanks to all of you who offered help and support. My host was able to restore my blog without having lost any information. However, it isn’t within their parameters to help me secure my files, which I had no idea how to do even with the list of suggestions they gave me. Not long afterwards, I was surprised to receive a Twitter reply from someone asking me about the hack and assuring me that the most current version of WP, which is the one I’ve been using since it was released, is secure. I gave him the full story and the next thing you know, Andrew Norcross came to rescue this damsel in distress.

With his help, which I highly recommend to anyone who needs it (he designs WordPress themes, too), my blog is now free from phantom admin users and other evil things that don’t belong. Andrew had to delete all of the users, so for any of you who were subscribed directly to my blog rather than through an RSS feed reader of some kind, you’ll have to re-subscribe. But I don’t think that’s a problem. Most people use feed readers these days anyway, right? (I do.) I even added a Subscribe widget to make things easier for you all.

Brian wrote 10 posts and those had to be attributed to me as the author, but that’s not a big price to pay. Neither was the cost of Andrew’s work. He also updated my theme so I now have threaded comments. Yay!!!

Though I still have a headache, I’m breathing a lot easier. Thanks again to everyone. I guess all of us WP users should prepare for a new update soon. Make sure you’re using the most current version if you use WP to blog! Earlier versions are even less secure than this one. Thanks again, everybody! Now I’m going to get off the computer and watch Season 3 of ER happily ever after.