Blog hacked – returns from the dead

I discovered it through a post on Friendfeed (one of the rare times that I checked my FF page) – it showed that a new post had been posted on my blog, with the title “Hello World”. It’s not a good feeling to suddenly see that something has been posted on your blog, without your control. When I loaded my blog, I saw that it had been entirely wiped out, and what was there instead was a brand new install of WordPress, with a blog called Busty, and one post saying only “Hello World”… I had been hacked.

I still am not quite sure how this happened. I am assuming it happened through some weakness in WordPress, since only my blog was affected of all the different content I host on my site, however I was running a fairly recent version of WP. In any case, the database holding all of my WP blog posts was completely hosed. I hoped in the longest that my host Site5.com would be able to restore the site from backups, but on my cheap plan, they only do one daily backup, and I discovered it too late – the backup from yesterday was already overwritten…

Of course, I ought to have had a backup myself, but I had been very lax. In fact, I thought I had a backup lying around somewhere, but could not find it. So what to do? Well, after some messing around, I managed to restore almost all the old posts using a Ruby script that parsed my old blog post pages through Google Cache. It worked surprisingly well, and I will do a separate post about how I did it. The most important thing, however, is that almost all of my posts should be back in place, at the same URLs as before (if you find any broken links etc, please let me know). Most of the comments should also be preserved, because I used Intense Debate.

To me, it’s certainly a reminder to be much more vigilant about security, and backups. It’s also a neat example of how “the cloud” can inadvertently function as a backup. I wouldn’t rely on it entirely, and it was a major pain to revert from HTML back into structured data for the database, but it’s incredible that it was even possible.

Happy New Year, all!
Stian

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.