I've actually just spent $180.00 for a new host, so I think I'll be moving from HostGator to NetFirms. NetFirms seems like it has a much more organized infrastructure, along with more reliable and secure servers. Plus, their control panel is SSL-secure which'll make me feel overall a lot safer. I am not sure how my sites got hacked but I know it was a direct crack in cPanel because I can see the hacker used cPanel for all of his/her micheif. I've also changed a lot of my passwords and scanned my computer for viruses and spyware/adware. Honestly one of my main concerns is my Digital Point blog. I had over 60 posts in there and I really hope that the time I spent making it wasn't lost. I actually might even have to sell that soon because of this... >.< This whole ordeal really got me into making sure everything is secure. I don't think a hacker could pentrate my PC. I have two or three firewalls including my router's firewall and also ZoneAlarm firewall. I hope the information wasn't exposed from my end, but I left nothing to show that it could. Another thing I am hoping wasn't stolen was my copy of vBulletin. I just bought it today, an owned license, and uploaded it onto my server. I hope the hacker didn't steal it and then try to use it! Well aside from losing 60 posts on my Digital Point blog and my vBulletin forum, valueable things such as databases may have been stolen and also a lot of sites including a popular topsite of mine might have been copped. I never really thought this could happen to me and read stuff like this all of the time. I have yet to see how it happened and what the actual vulnerability was, but I am now for sure not going to HostGator. Once my sites are restored I am immediately moving over to NetFirms for a hopefully more secure and better experience with my websites.
The $15.00 is cheap? I use hostgator for a couple of months and they where very promt and willing to help. I search hundreds and hundreds of hosting sites and finally found one that fits my budget and my hosting needs http://surfspeedy.com/. Hostgator cpanel gave me alot of trouble with the database so thats why i switch to surspeedy...Anyway, Good Luck and toes and fingers cross that you get it all backup and running soon.
DP Forever is gone now forever. The backup was made Sunday and DP Forever had over 50 posts within that time. Now there is nothing left.
I did a site command on Google to see if you could salvage some of your posts. Looks like they have 3 pages cached only. Your main page is cached, so you'll be able to salvage 8 posts.
Sorry to hear that your blog was hacked. Hope you get things going again. What CMS were you using for your blog? I’ve just finished changing my Passwords just in case.
Do you have any idea of who did this? You should investigate about that to prevent your website from another hack in the future. sad story
Please tell all your experiences regarding this so that we will be careful in future. Where do you think is the security breach? Keylogger? software not updated? malicious script??? and so on
Question: what are you running on your home PC? Windows XP? Do you have firewall/antivirus/spyware removal? What about hardware firewall? Do you run remote control software (such as VNC)? I recommend doing weekly FTP backups from CPanel by the way!
if they were dumb enought to delete the sites via file_manager then they might of left the deleted files in the trash_can? (just a suggestion)
Dont worry about vbulletin. Vbulletin knows that you are the legitimate owner, Just drop your url in their control panel.
Request the logs to trace back the activity that had happened. particularly syslog or secure logs. If that is a windows server ask for the events log if they have.
thats like horrible post, i will always care my hosting company and will always do backup my database....
Without scaremongering, you REALLY need to find out how they got the passwords. If there's a possiblity of having a keylogger on your system then they'll be able to do it again, and do whatever else they please like access email and your online banking login information. If in doubt I'd do a full format and reinstall of your hard drive.
i am sorry to hear about your loss but , quite frankly i feel too $15 is cheap for restoring multiple websites and databases .