My site got hacked, that means I’ve made it, right? Because only important, high-traffic sites get hacked.
Uhm, no. Of course not.
photo credit: wintersixfour
Forget that dramatic way of thinking. Because it’s false thinking. Sure, certain sites get specifically targeted for political or economic reasons – or for prestige like a hacking rite of passage – but AdvancingMusician does not fall into this category.
In general, hackers go for the low hanging fruit instead. They target smaller sites. The idea is to get them infected and divert resources towards sending SPAM mails, getting link juice for improved Google rankings or for installing malware like phishing scripts.
On December 11th, I got an e-mail from my hosting company. They had to take my site offline because their security mechanisms caught some malware script getting activated from one of my sub-folders.
So, despite running the latest versions of everything (WordPress, framework, theme and all plug-ins) my site was unreachable. No reason to panic. Just a quick install of a fresh WordPress instance followed by porting the database and everything is alright again.
Yes, in general that’s the procedure. But not in my case. And no, don’t think that I didn’t back-up my site.
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(link removed) Android device. It might not be the top of the line smart phone, but I’m really happy with it so far.
