Thoughts on recent experience with hacker
First of all, if anyone has ideas on making my situation more secure, let me know. This is what happened; Shortly after I left the UK for a trip to Spain a hacker broke into my online store which is a Zen Cart version 1.3.8a (yeah yeah I know it's old and has known vulnerabilities but it's a long story, we are migrating a completely different cart but these things take time).
I then noticed that he had also managed to get into my cpanel! Even after changing all the passwords and moving the admin folder he was right back into the zen cart again a few days later.
I am left still wondering exactly how he got in. perhaps a keylogger on my machine at home (at the time of the first hack I had not logged in abroad let alone accessed the zen cart or cpanel from my laptop)
He has managed to get back into the zencart yet again. In all cases it seems the motivation is purely monetary, he was trying to get customers to respond to a bogus email requesting card details again and most people these days are savy enough not to fall for that but I will say it was all very professionally done, perfect English and very legit in appearance.
Sooooo, any thoughts on how I can really friggin secure my cpanel and zen cart would be appreciated. So far I have changed all passwords, started using a VPN when doing any mods to the sites, scanned my laptop with three different anti-malware apps (which all came up clean).
Now, here's another thought; I am thinking about emailing the hacker because I have his email and basically just saying 'dude, I'll make you a deal, tell me exactly how you got in and agree to abstain and I'm happy to pay a reasonable fee'. I'd even be tempted to suggest a business could be built around security consulting. (keeping in mind of course this guy cannot be trusted but he obviously has some decent skills and knowledge, he should be making legit money on oDesk and not wasting time trying to run silly phishing scams.
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