We Were Hacked (by sarah)
The blog was hacked, I noticed about 4 hours after the initial hack but with Al at work I realised I did not know what to do about it. The hack happened in the middle of the night and wasn't a bad one, more a sort of warning that there was a vulnerability and I needed to sort it.
It had occurred in the wee hours of the morning, I assumed I'd logged in and forgotten somewhere so changed my password etc... but by the time Al got home from work the hacking had gotten realer and they were deleting blog content wholesale and leaving adverts and offensive material.
Still assuming it was me having been a muppet somehow Al nuked the blog, and did some tech voodoo and reset from the archives - no content was lost.
And it was hacked again - same pattern - first the guy warning that it is was hackable and then the others, this time worse because more people, bots, dark webbers, whatever... knew that it was doable and so where doing it. I started getting phone calls, texts and messages from readers who were noticing either by going to check for new content or are notified of thread changes (not sure the correct term for this on blogs as it's sort of a forum thing but some of our posts have turned into mini forums).
This time Al looked deeper and realised it was something that was wrong with the under laying WordPress platform that the blog is built on. He was puzzling how to fix it when they announced a patch/fix/upgrade. You don't announce hacking vulnerabilities until you have the fix. So it took about a week to fix the blog.
Al had super admined and changed my password and forgotten to let me know what it was... still a little nervous about new content surviving long enough for back up... so this is also a test post 🙂
Also a big big BIG thankyou to all of those who contacted us to let us know, if I hadn't been trying to blog daily at the moment we might have missed it for weeks!
Tue 21st Feb 2017 8:03 am 
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