I Got Hacked!

I guess it was bound to happen.. There I was happily tweeting away (on twitter obviously) and @jopkins told me something was up with my site.. I myself tweeted what had happened and @loudmouthman of Reduced Hackers was as ever the most easy to hear over the twitter static.

He told me to call him and I did immediately. Less than eight minutes later my site was back up and Nik had fixed it in the simplest of ways by first assessing all of the possibilities and then simply dropping a new index.php file onto my server.

He gave me some invaluable tips on how to protect myself in different ways from other possible attacks and did all of this whilst simultaneously dealing with a client in another part of the UK!

I have changed all of my passwords that could have been compromised but we won’t know for sure how they got in until we get the log files back from www.nxs.nl. Needless to say I have backed up again and realise i am more than a little lucky. Lucky because in about ten years of having websites this is only the second time that this has happened.. The first time was a nightmare. The difference now, is that with a single tweet, an expert like Nik came to the rescue and sorted it out in around half an hour. 

Nik is also the reason I have a Drobo sitting under the desk humming away casually backing up all of my data to protect against just such an event like this.

Not wanting to give him too much advertisement, the hacker is Turkish and had placed a page protesting against what he was calling..  ’Stop Bush Crusade II’. I am wondering if I was targeted as @Delboydare suggested because I have a short photo piece on Kurdistan.. We may never know.

Thanks to all of the other Twitterati that came to my aid with advice and suggestions as to what may have happened and how to sort it. There is a massive writhing beast of knowledge and skill out there in the collective mind.

We are connected.. with our fingers on the keyboards and our eyes fixed to screens.. It is almost as if the technology were grafted to our beings. We are the Twitter Borg.

 

[Check back in a little while and we may know more about how they got in to the site in the first place.]

Time Travelling

This blog on www.OurManInside.com is a bringing together web content published and created mainly by myself over the last few years.

The name Our Man Inside was initially associated with a friend I was helping to blog way back when he was finding his feet in the wide world of journalism. I had registered the name with the intention of setting up a private investigation company but since found a much better use for it.

Although i am writing this particular post ‘today’.. I am dating it in the dim and distant past, as after this is posted, I will retrieve a few other blog posts collected from other sites I have hosted over the years and re-post them here.

My first proper blog, hit the net on the 1st of February 2002. it was a part of a local documentary project I was working on in the town of Rugby. Due to not knowing much about the importance of backing up way back then, I lost a lot of content and blog posts. So here out of respect and remembrance is my first blog post (that i actually called a blog). As you may well imagine. It is not really that interesting. Just the first step out into a world I was mainly an observer of and now I wanted to participate.

“So this Is Blogging…
I have rarely read them and THIS is only the seventh word i have ever written in a blog. Yup, this is my first blogged paragraph.
Never-the-less i know they are everywhere and everyone seems to think they have something interesting to say.
Me… Well i haven’t anything at all to say… Not this minute anyway.”