All about me, all around me

We all know that Inter­net is not a safe place for many rea­sons. We all have heard about the “bad guys”, who we call “hackers”(they are not always bad, how­ever, because doing what they do, they can find impor­tant secu­rity issues and so to improve the secu­rity of an app, for exam­ple) and what they do. I have always thought and believed that they’re pay­ing more atten­tion to the “big­ger things” and a per­sonal blog, espe­cially mine, could not be their aim. Yes, but no! Some days ago I was sur­prised to find that my blog was hacked! I still can’t find any rea­son or expla­na­tion why I was hacked, but yet, it doesn’t mat­ter at all. “Let bygones be bygones”!

The story:

After writ­ing my lat­est post about The prodigy com­ing to Bul­garia, (that was the night before the blog was hacked), I woke up and saw that I have to approve a com­ment on one of my posts. I did approve it, left an answer to it, had my break­fast and went at the uni­ver­sity for my lec­tures. Dur­ing one of them, I opened my note­book to check some stuff, but when I tried to load my blog, I saw the nice mes­sage say­ing that some­thing went wrong “503 Ser­vice Unavail­able”. After check­ing what could have hap­pened, I noticed that I just don’t have my public_html direc­tory, where my blog WAS, on the server. I was panicky!

After a few tries, I did real­ize that there’s no way to restore my blog. I did remem­ber, how­ever, that I have a backup, but how sad was I to dis­cover that it was from two months ago, when the blog was not even the same as you are read­ing from it at the moment. “It doesn’t mat­ter”, I said to myself! It’s some­thing! But when I tried to restore it, every­thing went totally wrong.

Before back­ing up I was using 80 Mb of my web space(without even hav­ing the blog on the server). And after the back up was fin­ished, I was using 160 Mb with noth­ing, which seems to work OK! “Superb”, I said!

Des­per­ately, I started call­ing to the sup­port team of my host provider, but they didn’t answer at first. After try­ing to con­tact with them via their on-line chat, where nobody answered me, I felt that “that was it”, I lost my blog!

How­ever, I didn’t stop call­ing until some­one answered me! It took me more than two hours, but it’s worth it. The guy, who was on the other side of the phone, told me that he needs some time to see what have hap­pened. Half an hour after that, he called me and said to me that some­one, some­how has given a per­mis­sion 752 (which means that the “World” has the per­mis­sion to write) on my public_html folder. Hap­pily, every­thing works just fine now. What’s more, he restored the blog with backup, which was made at the end of April and so I needed to upload only some pic­tures again.

I express my thanks to TopHost and espe­cially to their sup­port team, because with­out their help, I don’t know what I was about to do now.

Huge thanks again, guys!

P.S. I think that it’s about time for me to start mak­ing back­ups more often! What do you think?