Hacked

I don’t know what it is about me and my blog, but I seem to be a very popular hacking victim.  It was just last month when my blog was hacked the first time, just over $200 later I was back online.  

Afterwards I installed all sorts of precautions that were *suppose* to deter like 80-90% of hackers.  

Clearly, this didn’t stop them as last night I was hacked again.  The very day I got the credit card bill from my last “site cleaning” it needed to be cleaned again.  But I just couldn’t afford to do it this time.  

So I cried.

I think only other bloggers understand just how much time and effort goes into customizing a word press theme, installing all your plug-ins and widgets, playing with codex, and getting everything to look the way you want it.  And then there is writing the posts, trying to promote your posts via twitter and Facebook, etc.  It’s a time consuming process.  All for something you hope might make you a few dollars someday.

Once I stopped crying, I uninstalled word press from my webspace provide control planner.  I deleted everything.  It was the only thing I could do.  So many files were infected it would have been impossible for me to do it, I couldn’t afford to hire someone else to do it so three years worth of posts, my beloved wordpress theme I had spent countless hours customizing, all gone. 

Then I had to wait.  I had to wait for Google to take me off their blacklist before I could even attempt to rebuild what I had lost.  So while I waited I looked around my computers.  Thankfully that past 2 months worth of posts were saved on my iMac, so I knew I could re-upload them once I was back up and running.  On my netbook I found a few more posts going back over a couple years that too could be re-uploaded.  

It’s been a long day.  I’m off the blacklist.  I’ve rebuilt my site, not to it’s former glory, but close enough.  I’ve been installing and setting up plug-ins and widgets like crazy (thank GOD I know html!) and I’ve re-uploaded approximately 45 blog posts.  That’s all I have to start over with – 45 posts.  I believe I had nearly 1000.  Shame on me for not having all of them backed up.  Truthfully, there are more on my netbook but I only re-published the ones I felt were important to me.  A lot of the old posts were junk.  But they were my junk.

Most of my recipes are gone, as well as most of my informative posts.  I will re-write and re-post them but it will take time.

Having had a full 24 hours to reflect on this, I’ve decided to mark this as a starting over point.  Like when a business burns down and they declare that they will rebuild and make it bigger and better than ever.  That is my mission.  To be bigger and better than ever.  And to start off I will be purchasing a package with Sucuri to prevent this sh*t from happening a third time.  And if you aren’t currently covered by a similar company/product, I’d certainly advise it.  It’s no fun having someone break in and ruin what you’ve worked so hard to put together.  And it’s especially not fun when it happens twice in a matter of 40 days.