I woke up this morning to a text from my personal trainer (who is also a client) saying her blog had disappeared. Thinking it was just a plugin issue I laughed and sent a text asking how had she managed to “break it!”
I logged in and decided to download all the plugins so I could start deleting them until I found the one causing the problem when my AVG security kicked in and told me about a threat to my computer. I decided to stop fiddling and call in the experts!
I contacted Dan at D9 Hosting who hosts my UK blogs and 15 minutes later he replied to say the offending malware had been removed, passwords changed and the blogs back thanks to their backup system. I was impressed and very happy. After I checked my reseller account another two blogs had been infected in the same way and they restored those too.
Instead of having to deal with this myself having a great hosting company meant it was sorted in no time.
So I fired up firefox and checked my hostgator account with my USA hosting – sure enough four blogs taken out. Got in touch with HostGator (and to be fair it was early in the UK so they were still fast asleep!) and a few hours later it was sorted too, passwords changed and blogs back.
That is one of the benefits of having great hosting companies!
I have known fellow bloggers who have lost their blogs for weeks because of them being hacked and it is definitely worth protecting them from that happening. The blogs they got into were the ones that didn’t have a secure password generated from the system but ones where I made up a password. Now they all have system generated passwords, you know the type – #]clj3*7dj’ – or something like that which no one could ever guess and I will never remember 
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That’s a frightening situation. Getting hacked is a constant concern nowadays. I use a free service called lastpass to generate and save encrypted passwords. It’s an additional protection against hackers and keyloggers.
Richard´s last [type] ..Learning a New Way to Get Targeted Traffic
Thanks for the tip Richard – will check that out too.
Sorry to hear about your experience, but glad you got it sorted out so quickly. I’ve had numerous blogs hacked in the past and although it was password related, it was never because the hackers guessed the passwords. Using system generated passwords made no difference. They had gained access to my ftp sites by planting a virus on my local computer which recorded passwords when I logged in. So it didn’t matter what I changed the passwords to until I got rid of that local virus. I was running AVG too and it didn’t catch it. I hope you’ve solved your problem for good, but if you find changing your password does not keep the hackers out this may be why.
BTW, right now one of my hosts has been hacked and a couple of my important sites have been up and down for a couple of days while they try to sort it out. I know how tricky these things can be so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
Rick Hendershot´s last [type] ..Steve Martin Banjo Man on CBC Radio
Hi Rick.
Yes they did the same thing with me. Got onto my local computer and in via my FTP software.
Hostgator recommended
MalwareBytes ( http://www.malwarebytes.org/ ) \
ComboFix ( http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix )
I used the first one – the free version – and it found 8 Trojans that it then removed.
Hopefully that will be that but I will run it every day for a while