What a stressful week it has been. Discovering our blog was hacked 2 weeks ago when we got what is called the “white screen of death” which matched the color of my face, was bad enough. The wonderful tech support from my server had me thinking we cleaned any back doors from being entered again, but I found out this week, that was not the case. I had to put a lockdown on brute force attacks and then resurrect my poor blog. I now know that the security I have in place will not allow brute force attacks and also let me ban countries where most of these mechanical bot hackers were coming from.
I don’t understand why any time is wasted hacking a “mommy blog.” Is it just to make the moms crazy or is it for some other reason? I wish someone would enlighten me because I don’t have my credit card numbers or bank account info anywhere on my blog. Absolutely baffling, but worse than that is all the time I lost having to spend days to get everything back up and running. It also occurred at the worst time of the year since sponsors are really in a time crunch and losing days getting holiday gift guide products up is unacceptable.
I however, feel empowered now and the new security installed alerts me right away and bans the user ip of anyone trying to guess the password to log on. Beyond that we have added a telephone code that changes every 30 minutes to the password so they would literally have to come and steal my phone now to have a chance at logging on. All the malicious code they hid on my site has been detected and erased. I look at the reports each day and smile, our spam has been reduced 1000 fold, declining log on attempts are reported since we banned countries and the hackers ip addresses. I almost was physically ill looking at the log on attempts to my blog, It made me scared but then turned to anger and finally to action, putting the plan in place to lock them out for good. Now, I feel great about the security of my site.
I know you all had difficulty leaving comments or not being able to bring the blog up while we were in maintenance mode and I thank you for you patience. I am scrambling to catch up but have some awesome giveaways to put up this weekend so please stay tuned. We also are behind drawing winners and we will get to that too!
Thanks again for sticking around, I truly appreciate it.
What on earth?! It sounds like this wasn’t a random hacking, or maybe it was, but they sure seemed intent on getting back in…but for what?? Weird, and I can only imagine what a huge stress it was for you. I am glad to know there’s a reason commenting was difficult, but I’m sorry you had to deal with this. It does sound, however, that you dealt the final blow and are virtually unhackable now, so good for you! Glad you’re back and security is stronger than ever!