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? 🙂
