I got hacked…

A week ago someone hacked into my blog server and replaced my entries with static pages containing links leading to some very malicious sites. Needless to say that within hours most search engines had black-listed Lapsus Calami and had refused access. Even my own Kaspersky flashed a big warning block in bright red colors every time I tried to log on. I literally had to delete my entire website from the server because there seemed no way to access it in any attempt to recover or repair.

And that’s not the worst news. Yes, yes, there’s more. I have a multi-session DVD that I’ve been using for backup. Since blog entries are not really data intensive, I’ve been incrementally backing up my blog for a long time on this DVD. I think I’ve used up about 15-20% of its capacity. I never really bothered to check the backups since there had never been a need for it. Imagine my shock when I found that the DVD is corrupted and the data on it is literally gibberish.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat, loosely – when it rains, it pours. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if my backup hadn’t failed. I have had the server crash before but because the backup had worked, things returned to normal within a few minutes. But this time not. Now I just have to work at it all over again. I can’t replace the lost entries, the only thing I can do is move on and keep writing. Which on the whole isn’t such a bad deal. I write mainly because I want to write, the content or the frequency of entries isn’t all that important. Almost like having a clean slate all over again for a fresh start. At least this time I’ll pay more attention to keeping working backups, something I have advocated to everyone who has ever bothered to ask.

Its just embarrassing that I never bothered to verify whether the backup I was creating was any good. I have learned a very important lesson in the digital age the hard way. I’ve also learned that just giving a write command to the DVD and hoping it will do the rest isn’t always in my best interests. It did what I told it to do but not what I wanted it to and computers are exceptionally gifted with that attribute.

I’m sorry but I’m going to be keeping the comments ‘off’. Apparently, its easier to get access to the website server if the comments are turned ‘on’ through some security vulnerability. I didn’t know that. I only found out in response to the searches I did hoping for a solution. Its not a big loss but I hope you all will understand. Its no fun to get hacked. My stats are also all haywire, I hope Google will take me off its black-list and allow people to visit my blog again. It may take some time but then I suppose it will also give me more time to fill up the posts again.

I don’t have a backup of all the customization I did for the original theme ‘Ad-celerum’. I love this theme and have used it for a long time but I don’t have the patience to tweak it up again, so I just managed to grab the first free theme that fit the bill, modified and stripped it of all the encrypted dynamic code leading to the outside world (there was a lot of it). The website from where I downloaded it specified a normal GPL license. I guess I’m good with that.

Ok, ready, here we go!