Was I hacked or what? Hmmm...
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- Ellie
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 143
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I have a situation that has me confused and concerned. I was away from my computer for the weekend and when I logged on this morning the first thing that I did was check the "week-end box-office" for my newly launched site. I was very surprised and alarmed to see that on a site that was running about 22000 visits a day, I had a grand total of 1 for all of Saturday.
So I assumed that my host server had gone down for the day and did a search on their forums for the name of the server I'm on, and found a post by a fellow with several sites on the same server as I do, who was complaining of problems that he was having over the weekend where his site was down and not even listed as having a hosting account any longer. After some communication with our hosts, his site was back up and running, but it was the site as it was a couple of months ago. All his more recent content was gone.
So I hopped on my site and saw that indeed, my site was showing a last content item added as from August 9th. All the mad crazy work I had done for the last month was missing. My site had 'time-traveled' for some reason. I did get it restored to two weeks ago, and am working on a better backup solution for myself, but I can't sort out why it happened in the first place. My hosts say that it was not on their end, and that I should look into better passwords for my admin. I have a fairly complicated password (now updated, of course) but I feel pretty uneasy still.
I have about 80 hours of do-over ahead of me, and I suppose I can try to do a full daily backup in the future, but it still remains...what the @#$ happened? Has anyone heard of a situation like this? I'd like to have some idea how to protect against this in the future, but I am flummoxed.
Anyone have any ideas? - It feels like someone with a fever is yelling at my pants.
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- William E Dooley
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 740
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- Web Developer
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Ellie,
Sure hate to hear it, but it does happen and teaches us a BIG lesson - backup more often. A few weeks ago it happened to me and I am still trying to make up all the work. I have learned to do more backups then what I had been doing and I also backup the database and put it with the backup of the site. We used to do this all the time when my IT guy was here, but since he left (off visiting that college with bars on the window) I hadn't done a backup in a few weeks, but not anymore. Now it has been almost daily. I also use joomlacloner and have had pretty good success with it.
William
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- Ellie
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 143
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Thanks for the tea and sympathy William. I have indeed learned my lesson. And as soon as I can stop the compulsive rocking, thumb sucking and moaning, I am planning on installing JoomlaCloner as well. I am very happy to hear that you are pleased with it, as it isn't the cheapest puppy in the window, but seems to be much appreciated by those who have it.
I just wish I understood what went awry in the first place. I hope it was simply the gremlins, and not actual baddies, as I was already one of the lucky few who was hacked by the spammers who were exploiting a few J!Reactions sites just last month.
And congrats on getting your IT guy into an institution of higher learning. Especially the program you mention, as I understand it has some pretty stringent entrance requirements. I'm sure that if you are lucky enough to land his services again after he has finished his term, he will have all sorts of useful new tricks up his sleeve. - It feels like someone with a fever is yelling at my pants.
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- Joe K
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Sorry about what happened to your site.
If you have a cpanel for hosting you can either backup your site manually pretty quickly or create a cron job (not sure how) that will do it automatically each day.
extensions.joomla.org/component/option,c...ink_id,35/Itemid,35/
Here is one of a few things on the joomla.org site you can use for the database. - Last Edit: 17 years 2 months ago by Joe K.
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- Donna Vincent
- Hero Rocketeer
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- I use JomBakup on all my sites. It emails a copy of the database everyday. And because Yahoo email has unlimited storage, I can save all the backups.
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- Dan L
- Elite Rocketeer
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- JoomlaCloner with a scheduled Cron job is the order of the day.
- Toolbox Digital | Dribbble | Forrst
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- Mack
- Elite Rocketeer
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I did this to myself once, not sure if it could be the problem. My gut would tell me your host screwed you and just won't tell you.
I had multiple drives, mirrored (raid). One day I noticed that the mirror had stopped, so I set them to re-sync. i chose the wrong one to sync, and ended up with 12 day old data. But in my case, after I figured it out, I just restored my backup from the previous day.
Most people don't learn the lessons about backups until they lose 80 hours worth of work.......
A lot of decisions are made based upon how much it costs. Someone mentioned that backup solutions were "pricey'. Ask yourself this question:
How much will it cost if you DON'T do it? - Last Edit: 17 years 2 months ago by Mack.
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- Ellie
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 143
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Thanks everyone. I just purchased and installed JoomlaCloner, and have run my first backup. I feel so much better now.
I did discover an odd thing about my site after this weird hack/server boo-boo/act of God thingie. I went to re-install one of the components that I had uploaded last week, and even though it wasn't listing in my components menu on the backend, when I tried to install it I got the message that that file I was trying to save it to was already in use. Hmmm..
So I opened up Xplorer, and sure enough, there was the file for the component. So I deleted the file, reinstalled and everything is dandy. But I'm wondering, how is that still there?
Then a bit later, I was redo-ing one of the lost content items from last week, and when I went to upload the image that goes with it, well, of course, there it was, still in my image files.
Is this normal? Does it make sense? But what I really want to know is, could it be that all the content items that I had created that were seemingly wiped out from the last couple weeks, could they still be lurking somewhere? And is there a way to use Xplorer to access one's content items? If so, I'd surely like to at least have a look before I start from scratch again.
BTW Mack, my gut tells me it was the host as well. >
- Last Edit: 17 years 2 months ago by Ellie.
- It feels like someone with a fever is yelling at my pants.
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- Mack
- Elite Rocketeer
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- From what you describe, it sounds more like your site files were fine, the mysql database is what was restored. That would explain why the files for components and pictures for articles are there. That's what happens when you restore an old copy of a DB for a site. (voice of unfortunate experience) Might ask your host if they could restore one from a couple days ago. They might have a daily backup.
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- Dan L
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1453
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Mack wrote:
Most people don't learn the lessons about backups until they lose 80 hours worth of work.......
Too true...I come from an IT background being responsible for backing up several hundred gigabytes of data every night. Most people just think it's over the top, but total loss of data could crush a company at it's worst. - Toolbox Digital | Dribbble | Forrst
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