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02.18.09 Recovering Your Sites After A Major Attack  By
Drew Stauffer So your website has been hacked. All your pages are gone and you can't log into anything to make changes. What do you do and how do you fix it? I've been hacked twice in the past 16 months, and the first time it happened, I was extremely scared, nervous and pissed all at the same time. The second time around I was able to handle the situation with a little more composure. ***NOTE: I believe I keep getting hacked because I haven't done a very good job of keeping my WP up-to-date. Keeping WP up-to-date is your first and best defense, but if it happens…read on. One of the first things that comes to my mind when I run across that horrible "You've been hacked" message on my homepage is concern about being able to retrieve all of my posts. Ideally you should be continually backing up your WP database to keep all of your posts and comments stored. Depending on how often you post on your blog will determine how often you should update your database. I only write between two and four posts a month and I try to back up my database once a month. That way if for some reason I lose all my posts, I've really only lost the ones since my last back up. If I posted five times a day, I would maybe backup the database twice a week. It basically comes down to how many posts you think you can afford to lose. There are a few plugins that make backing up your database easier but you can also go the manual route. Steps to getting your blog back So my first step in getting my blog back to normal was to make sure I had all my posts backed up. As soon as I realized I got hacked, I tried to log into my dashboard. No luck; can't get to that page. Since I had no access to anything WP, I had to back things up manually. I logged into my cPanel and went through the steps for backing the database through phpAdmin. Luckily with the type of hack that got my site, all of my posts were intact.
Once I was able to download multiple versions of my database (just in case one doesn't work for some odd reason) I was able to move onto getting my blog back to normal. You'll also want to make a copy of the themes that you are using because you'll have to upload those as well. If you have FTP access you can download them from your site, or you might already have them on your system. When I was researching how to handle a hacked website, I ran across several articles that mentioned looking for specific php code snippets on certain pages. I didn't like this method because it could mean hours of searching through code and possibly never resolving the issue. So I went another route. Download the newest Wordpress I went and downloaded the newest version of WP. Since I don't know how hacks work and what files they use, for me, the best alternative was to re-upload almost everything and overwrite the existing files. The wp-config file has all of your settings that connect your blog to your database so you need to make sure this file is updated before you upload the new files. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Drew Stauffer is the founder of Alibi Productions, a web development company focused on professional search engine optimization. Drew also serves as a blogging consultant for both independents and large companies. |
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