Hacked!

That wasn’t the hack. That was the default my hosting company displays after it disables a site. They disabled my entire account, including my coaching websites! Everything was down and displaying a version of that page, because apparently they found malware on my sites. So they took all my sites down and sent me an email telling me to get it fixed.

See the message in the top right corner? “Webmaster, please contact Hostgator.” Yeah, I’m the webmaster for my websites, and Hostgator is the company that hosts my websites on their server.

I had to hire a security company to clean the sites. Luckily they were able to get it done just by running software, and did not have go through my files by hand (or it would have been a lot more expensive and a lot slower). After the sites were clean, I had to submit a request to my hosting company that they review and republish the websites.

It took 2 days, several hours on the phone, and a number of hundreds of dollars, but I’m back online. As if I didn’t have anything else to worry about the middle of this week.

I don’t know what malware was on my sites, and I don’t care to find out. About 10 years ago I got hacked and they inserted porn on my site, which I found myself. Luckily I didn’t see the porn itself, I just saw the file names (which were plenty horrifying enough). I bet you never thought about what people name porn files. I was shocked to see long, descriptive titles. I don’t know if I expected cryptic numbers or what (I mean, I didn’t expect anything because I didn’t know it was there).

Back then, 10 years ago, I was closely watching my website statistics, and I noticed a sudden, incredible increase in hits on my site. My viewership was going through the roof with exponential growth, and I had no idea why. So I looked at each page, to see which pages were suddenly so popular, and it wasn’t any of my pages. So then I went in the back-end to my server and looked at the files, and that’s when I found them. I deleted them out by hand.

Luckily, I don’t think any of my legitimate traffic would have seen the porn, because it wasn’t on the pages that people would access through the menu on my site. My own pages were untouched.

But that was 10 years ago, and things are way more complicated now. This time I couldn’t even find my files on the server, much less try to clean it myself. It probably wasn’t something as easy and simple as bogus files. The malware could have been anything – bots using my server space, running for who knows what kind of purpose.

Now I have a contract with Sitelock, which is the company that ran the software to clean the site. I’ll pay them monthly on a year-long contract, and they’ll automatically run their software every day. Hopefully that will keep this from happening again.