What to do when you're Hacked

All good hosts take regular (daily) backups, so they should be able to replace the site for you from their backups.

Once it's back change ALL your usernames and passwords on every part of your site, don't allow any 777 permissions on any file or directory inc CGI bin & htaccess.

I know it's scary the first time you get hacked but take it as a compliment that somebody obviously sees you as a threat to their business. You'll come back stronger through this.

Best of luck

HostGator does backups. Ask them for last week's backup and they should be able to restore everything.

TomG.

I know this doesn't help you now - but it might in the future.

I build all of my sites with a website builder on my computer and then load them to the server.

If they get messed up on the server I just load them to the server from my computer again.

My host (Not Host Gator) has backups of everything.

I would imagine so does HostGator... so they should be able to back up to whatever is the most recent version they have for your account. It's going to be up to you to push for a good result.

This will probably take some work on the telephone.

Sometimes you don't realize the value of paying a few extra dollars for hosting until it's too late.

You need to go Higher Up the Host Gator chain of command. It's ridiculous for them to just say you were using too many resources.

Most of the people saying how great HostGator is are doing it because they pay high commissions to affiliates. And unlimited has plenty of limits as you are finding out.

I actually lol'd when I read their response, never heard of a host refusing to take backups before.

Hostgator keeps weekly backups unless it is a dedicated server.. Dedicated you are responsible to do your own backups as WHM will do them automatically for you on the time when you select for the backup to be done.

You should also have backups on your computer, if you do not then this is a huge lesson learned... Always keep backups on your computer, an external hard-drive is better though.

James

Yep, always keep backups on your PC (even though it's a lot to manage), ya never know when something like this might happen!

Good luck in restoring your sites!

~D.C.

Thank you All Folks,

Yes, a huge lesson learned here...

Back-up at least once a month to avoid future problems.

We don't see the gravity until it happens to us...

Months of work ahead of me. Well live and learn, and always do backups.

John P.

Sorry Johnpal I feel for you, I hope it does not happen to me

There is a solution but its really painful and might not even work: go to Archive.org and check which of your websites are archived. Proceed to save all the content you can find.

Good luck, you're really going to need it...
Tyrus

Started thinking about this again. If they do advertise that they do backups maybe it would be worth a small claims court lawsuit, which you can do for yourself in Canada for about $30. It works for claims up to $3000. Probably something similar in the states. Even if the fine print takes that away they really should communicate with you if they stop doing it.

At least talk to them a little more, mention you are just a tiny bit grouchy and you might accept an out of court settlement for about 400 years of free hosting.

Isn't Hostgator running daily backups? What about if their severs are crashing? Must be some solution for you dude!

Hi John,

If you're using a webmaster or designer, they'd have backups or working files in their own computer.

Or if you were doing all the site building yourself, where do you keep your own working files?

That also happened to me recently, with about 20 sites turning to dust. So I took the opportunity to rework the pages of my main sites, changed to a new hosting service, then uploaded everything fresh and new from the working files on my computer.

But let me guess - no working files - right?

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles

what about google cache? or some archival internet thing? how is it you don't have anything on your computer?

So sorry to hear that your sites got hacked. That's why I have an assistant do full backups on ALL my sites, on a regular basis; that way, if anything happens (hacking/power outages/server hosts disappear or are held hostage by aliens -- hey maybe that's a good theme for a movie or something. . . ) I will not have lost more than a couple of days' work at most.

Apart from doing backups and due diligence with your hosting company, are there other preventative items to do that can actually stop sites from being hacked? (This question would be addressed to any of the techie folks here I presume. . . )

Thanks in advance -- I'm looking forward to hearing about methods that are somewhat failsafe, I suppose you could say, for hacker prevention. Maybe there is no such thing, but if there is let's share it for goodness sake!

Here are some tips on protecting and recovering. I work for a major Telecom company in their Network Operations Center Fulltime and handle abuse from time to time as well as own a Web hosting company. Here are somethings I do to make sure I don't get hacked.

Tips to reduce your chances of being hacked and how to recover when you do.

1. Passwords passwords p455w0rD5.... If a lot of your sites use dictionary words with no caps and no or very few numbers and it may be the same one for all of you sites. Consider yourself hacked. Hackers use dictionary files of with thousands of word combinations and can brute force their way into your site.

2. CMS content management systems such as Wordpress,Joomla ect ect. If you are mass producing sites that have these systems and you are not going in or have cron job set up to update security patches consider yourself hacked.

It will happen. Bottom line...

Hackers use programs that utilize black hat google searching for certain files that can be exploited and they will reset your admin password and deface or destroy your site depending on how destructive they want to be.

3. 3rd party bots and plugins...
This goes for Wordpress,Joomla,Mambo ect ect. You will have to make sure you keep updated on security patches on these as well.
Sometimes a teenage programmer writes a jam up plugin we all want to use then goes off to college or on vacation for 4 years with no new updates.
Then a flaw is found where hackers or spammers can use it to relay or do SQL injections through a form or unprotected file and get into or wreak havok on your site.

SQL injections are usually the main way hackers can wreak havok and seems to be the poison of choice for web pages.

3.5. Also, I am seeing plugins for Wordpress and other CMS the main way a lot of sites are getting hacked these days. Limit your plugins to trusted programmers and sites. Sometimes those Plugin WSO's seem awesome but may burn you in the long run.

4. Also, make sure your database passwords have capital letters and number combinations.

If you just cover those main 3 you will cut hacking down to 95%.

Tips on Recovery

1. Make sure your current Host is backing up every day!! Hostgator and all those sites you can host a site for 3.99 a month are great but when you lose your whole business in 24 hours to some russian teenager how great is it then?

I charge my customers 10.00 a month but I can back them up at any giving time.

2. You can back up your own sites via Cpanel you should have a cronjob set it will back up all your sites especially if you are a web hosting reseller. You set the time and it will send a .rar or tar file via email to a gmail backup account or to a remote site not hosted by you maybe to your own ISP provider web space via FTP. If you are not doing that then you may just lose everything.

Hope this helps you and your sites from being hacked. It sucks to find out your $1000.00 a day weight loss site now has a image of a smiley face and some wierd language written all over the page. To your success! =)

Dont worry, HostGator will do a backup and you should be able to retrieve all your websites info back as soon as they do this. Though I have seen that their customer support is not very friendly and helpful, you'll just have to be patient. Best of luck!

Well, I used to think that way, but it happened! And could happen to anybody out there! So it's best to be prepared for the worst. Do your own back-ups and take the necessary precautions to avoid those low-life creatures out of your system.

John

Hi John,

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I always though that the hosting company will do at least a weekly back up and you should be able to ask them to restore it back.

A good reminder to always back up all the files that we have.

Zack

This should be a lesson for all of us, I'm doing a backup right now

As well as using archive.org to recover pages, you can do the same with Google if you're quick enough. Google your site, view cached pages, and save them. (You need to do this before they re-index and delete the cached pages.)

Sorry to hear about your loss. I had a financial website that used ecurrency for payment. Someone hacked into it and I lost a lot of money.

I eventually had to shut down the site.

Wish you the best. Hopefully you can find a backup of your sites somewhere.

This is a quite terrifying thread... just saying.

I know you've heard this before ...

But I am really sorry that this has happen to you. I had 2 of my sites hacked few months ago. My host were very on-the-ball. Excellent customer support. You can call any time day and night .... they went through every thing with me whilst I was on the phone to them. They also checked my permission settings whilst I was on the phone to them. They completely restored my site (all this free of charge) I recommend them to my clients all the time. They are iXwebhosting.com I have their $7.95 a month business plan.

I have HG is good and yet to try them

Hope you bounce back better than before.

To your Success
Para