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I got hacked

HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
edited March 2008 in Technology
Darn WordPress.

One of my blogs got hacked some time in the last few months. Unlike most malicious hackers who go in and screw everything up this person just added a bunch of text links in some old articles. Now I have to go through about 1,000 old articles and check them all for sabotage.

One of my readers tipped me off. If not for them I would have never known I had been hacked.

Tonight I will have to make sure everything is updated and change passwords. Does anyone know of a way to quickly find out if your pages have been altered? Is there a field in the database that tracks the last time a page was edited not just the publication date?

Comments

  • AlanAlan
    edited March 2008
    I would recommend backing up your word press at least twice a month for this vary reason. I'm searching for some info on this but no luck so far. I'll update this post if I find anything. The only thing I can think of is maybe something that could compare your backups with the current entries and I'm looking in that direction also.

    edit:
    You may be able to do this with some MySQL but I really don't have too much knowledge in that direction so I'll have to leave it up to someone else sorry.
    Post edited by Alan on
  • HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
    edited March 2008
    I do rolling 7 day backups as well as a full server backup every weekend.

    Judging by the Post ID numbers (a few spam posts were added) this happened a couple of months ago and went unnoticed. I only found out because I was checking a stat package I thought I had removed (some code was in the header.php file) and I saw some strange out-click data. (MyBlogLog, there was a message from a reader and they track some stats.)

    My backups are full backups, not just DB backups. As such I would have to:
    1 do a fresh backup
    2 save it
    3 restore to an earlier version of the site
    4 backup the DB
    5 restore back to my most recent backup
    6 backup the DB
    7 compare both DBs

    Because I don't know exactly when this happened it would be a pain in the ass narrowing down which backup to restore from.

    I used the WayBack machine and Google Cache to look at older versions of my archive page to check for missing articles but nothing came up missing or the cached copies were to far out of date to be useful.
    Post edited by HMTKSteve on
  • AprecheApreche
    I just setup nightly database backups. This problem can't happen to us.
  • HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
    Any website can be hacked.
  • AprecheApreche
    Any website can be hacked.
    I guess technically nothing is 100% secure. I mean, if my hosting company was malicious, then there is a security hole right there. While nothing is 100% secure, I've found that the only systems that actually get compromised are the ones that are horrendously insecure, or are high profile targets.
  • HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
    Any website can be hacked.
    I guess technically nothing is 100% secure. I mean, if my hosting company was malicious, then there is a security hole right there. While nothing is 100% secure, I've found that the only systems that actually get compromised are the ones that are horrendously insecure, or are high profile targets.
    True enough. I have been seeing a rise in hackers attacking low traffic blogs with good SERPS. These hackers do stealth hacking rather than the the high profile "pays us $50K or we kill your site" hacking.

    If someone hacks your site in an obvious manner you will find it fast and restore from the previous night's backup. It's when they hack you only a little bit that you do not notice it and once you do notice it months may have passed by. I wonder if there is a plugin for WordPress that can email you whenever a post is saved?
  • RymRym
    I wonder if there is a plugin for WordPress that can email you whenever a post is saved?
    It's tricky. They might manipulate the database directly. You're better off monitoring that in some way.
  • HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
    I wonder if there is a plugin for WordPress that can email you whenever a post is saved?
    It's tricky. They might manipulate the database directly. You're better off monitoring that in some way.
    I might have to write up something that would generate a checksum for every post in the DB. Then I can put in a cron job to check all of the checksums on a nightly basis and email the results back when a mismatch is detected.
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