My other blog was hacked

Feb 7, 2017 | online publishing | 0 comments

My other blog was hacked

My other blog, Vic.Pics, was hacked!
Luckily it wasn’t too bad. Thankfully I have regular automatic WordPress back-ups to restore from.

I’d logged into the site’s Dashboard and installed some updates, I then clicked on “Visit Site” for a quick look before I started working on the next post. I was shocked to see that the most recent post title had been changed to “hacked by NG689Skw”. Clicking on the post revealed that the text and image had been deleted.

I had been using two factor authentication, where I needed my phone to log-in, so how had NG689Skw access my WordPress install? Checking my settings revealed that my admin password hadn’t been disabled. Doh!

My hosting provider, Crazy Domains, offers automatic back-up of WordPress installs, so I was easily able to roll-back the site to the previous back-up. The next step was to try to prevent any further un-authorised access, so I also updated my settings, removing all password log-in methods.

The moral of this story is to ensure is to have back-ups of everything and use two factor authentication for your log-in. Make sure you disable the legacy settings, so a password cannot be used to log-in. That way you can spend more of your time writing and publishing.

This post contains affiliate links to my host provider, Crazy Domains.

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Stuff By Josh

Mar 20, 2016 | Family, online publishing | 0 comments

Three years ago I started a blog for my 13 year old son, Josh. Titled “Stuff By Josh”, my idea was that it would encourage him to write about whatever interested him. He wasn’t doing too good with his English at school, he was more interested in playing video games like Minecraft, so I thought if we encouraged him to write about his games at least that would have him thinking about spelling, grammar and the composition of legible sentences.

Unfortunately, the Stuff By Josh blog didn’t last very long. After just six posts, Josh lost all interest in blogging. In a few days time the domain name I registered for the blog, stuffbyjosh.com, is expiring, so I’m simply going to let it go. It would only be $12.50 to renew the domain through Crazy Domains, but as the log-in details are long forgotten there isn’t much point.

For the sake of archiving Josh’s work before it disappears, I’ve taken some screenshots for the gallery below. (It can also be found in the Internet WayBack Machine.)