Hacked

Creative Commons image by Santiago Zavala.

Last week my life was put on a hold for much longer than I would have liked when I discovered that one of my websites, The Pixar Podcast, was hacked. Instead of pointing to my content, it was pointing to some advertisement site for an energy drink.

In a word: yikes.

Hacking is something that can come up when you're not careful with you content. I use wordpress.org, which allows me to host my site on my own server (I use iPage), but it is also vulnerable to compromises if you don't update things as they become available.

I couldn't even log into the wp-admin panel to make a copy of my content, and I faced losing everything. Luckily, I was not in danger of losing my episodes -- which really matter much more than anything on my website -- because I host them on a separate server (I use Media Temple). But I was rather bummed about starting from scratch on my website.

I chatted with someone at iPage to try to figure out what happened, and they pointed me to SiteLock, a service I pay for to protect my website. However, when I got on the phone with SiteLock, I found out that they don't actually fix anything unless I pay them more, and that the service I already was paying for was simply an alert service (which apparently is not really that great).

The very nice lady talked with me for several minutes about my options, starting with paying about $400 right then and there for them to fix my site. She was able to get it down to $50/month, which would of course end up being much more over time.

I decided to use some crowdsourcing to investigate the problem. I emailed smart people I know (including Dr. Burton!) but I also reached out to listeners of the podcast via facebook and twitter. Since resolving the problem I took down my plea, but it was essentially, HELP! Anyone know of any alternatives to paying a million dollars?

I got a few emails that clarified some things for me, and ended up chatting at length with a friend of mine who knows a lot about technology. He thought it sounded unnecessarily steep, so I continued to investigate. Eventually, I realized that the backup I had previously made on my computer was enough, and I was able to wipe my server clean, and re-upload the old version of the site. It took a long time to figure out how to do that, but in the end I was $400 richer (or, less poor).

One area I explored was to switch over to microblogging, like tumblr. This is an option that had some plusses (less to worry about), but also some negatives (less easy to make it look professional, less control). If I can find the right theme, though, this still is an area I may explore in the future.

The point is, kids, wear your seatbelts on the Internet. There are folks who want to get you. Backup your stuff, update your stuff, and keep afloat of the dangers that lurk.