Comments on: Karen Lee Field’s flash fiction contest

By: alan

alan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:42:32 +0000

That is weird! Hopefully your ISP was on the case quickly and fixed everything up. As you run WordPress software, I would recommend installing the WP-DB-Backup widget, which will give you weekly backups of your content. I would also suggest going through all your coding in the Editor pages and copying that to Wordpad .txt files (or similar). That should prevent you from ever losing too much.

By: Karen Lee Field

Karen Lee Field — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:15:52 +0000

Firstly, thanks Alan for mentioning the competition on your blog. It’s very much appreciated.

As for the hacking, I’m at a loss. There has been so many people tell me about it, but I didn’t see it for myself and the site is as normal this morning. I’m doing a security check anyway. The more I read about hackings, the more I think I should create new databases and upload a previous backup to be safe. The hacker might have returned things to normal … just for now. How am I supposed to know?

By: alan

alan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:45:16 +0000

Hmm, not sure. Karen’s site is back up again now though.

By: J. M. Strother

J. M. Strother — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:21:29 +0000

Is it a self hosted WordPress site? There was a reported WordPress hack this past weekend. The article I read said it goes deep into the database and the only way to recover from it is to do an XML export of your content and then reload it into a new instantiation of a patched WordPress. Sites hosted by WordPress were not effected.
~jon

By: alan

alan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:44:31 +0000

Thanks James – I’ll make sure Karen knows this stuff.

By: James Frost

James Frost — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:38:47 +0000

Idiots – I presume that Karen is reporting this to her ISP so they can trace those responsible, and also identify how the site was hacked.

Your ISP should also have a full backup of your site from yesterday – just make sure you close the security hole once it is restored in case you are hit again straight away.

By: alan

alan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:06:42 +0000

Thanks Katherine. I’ve deleted the names from your comment – I’m not going to give these fuckwits any press. Hopefully Karen can get it sorted quickly and hopefully she hasn’t lost too much content.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:03:40 +0000

I checked and it looks like this hacker:

[deleted]

has gone after Karen with a vengeance. If you try to log on to her new site, or even the old one, you get his bwah ha ha message with a thanks to [deleted].

By: alan

alan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:37:55 +0000

Oh man, that sucks. There are some fucking idiots in the world. I’ll let Karen know. Thanks for the heads up.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:50:07 +0000

thanks for the info–I wasn’t able to access the link though, it’s been hacked