Dealing With Blog Hack

Hi readers!
How are you today? Good I hope. In my previous post here, I said I’d share my dealing with blog hack experience. It was quite a not so funny one honestly. Prior to June 2016, my blog was being hosted on the WordPress platform that is, it was lifeofdammy.wordpress.com, I can tell you it is more professional and your blog sounds serious when you get a domain name. Everyone has a WordPress blog these days, some don’t take their blogging serious and the way to make yours stand out is having a domain name.

So I got a domain name from a particular hosting company in Ibadan, got my site hosted on their platform too. One thing about self-hosted site is it can be quite confusing at first. The site is no longer under WordPress so you have to put security measures in place and be careful of the themes and plugins you make use of.

Selfhosted blogs are prone to blog hack and sooner or later you’d have to experience dealing with blog hack. June 27, I was trying to upload a post on the blog and it wasn’t going through. I refreshed and noticed the ‘hacked by BlackShadow’ on the homepage. I panicked immediately. Mind you, all the stats from my old blog was moved to the new one and I thought of the horror of starting all over again.

“Calm down.” Eji said to me over and over.
“I can’t calm down, This is like my life!”
My heart was already racing and I couldn’t breath properly. Sat in a corner till I was better then did I think of calling all the back-end coders I knew to help. As computer scientists, we all have areas we specialize in and I am not good at back-end work or hacking. Back-end work deals with everything that goes behind all you can see on a website or blog.

Called a guy I knew while checking Google for help. Google sites can be quite pessimistic and useless sometimes. I couldn’t make sense out of any of the methods offered. Called another friend and ratted off my username and password. Can you believe he laughed at my plight? With two coders informed already, I texted the admin of the hosting company and he said he’d work on it too. Managed to get some sleep that night.

Woke up the next day and Uncle Shadow was still in charge. I started praying he had not deleted the blog content. Went to school grumpily and told another friend who said she knew a genius coder. Sent him the login details and started to feel a little better. Nothing happened throughout that day. Early the next day, my site was back and running. Shed a tear of gratitude and then began the process of finding out who retrieved the site. None of the people who I called to help actually helped. It was the guys at the hosting company that got the blog back. Life can be funny.

But about a week later, the admin of the hosting company sent out mails to all clients. The hack had been majorly from their end but the theme I was using at that moment made my blog hack easier. I really don’t know why hackers hack website. It’s not cool at all. Make use of your talents positively. Please don’t put people through the stress of dealing with blog hack.

Now it might seem like an hack is quite unlikely for your blog or website but it is also unpredictable. In case your site ever gets hacked, follows these steps in dealing with blog hack.
1. Keep calm. Trust me you can’t think clearly if you panic. Panicking will not solve the issue at hand.
2. Backup your blog from time to time to be safe.
3. Change your password immediately if you still have access to your site.
4. Inform your hosting company.
5. Get help from professionals or people experienced in resolving hacks.
6. Pray.

Bloggers, have you ever been in a similar sticky situation before? Perhaps you already had a blog post typed out and then you lost it. Experienced a blog hack before? How did you cope? The best part of posting here is getting your feedback and comments. What are your thoughts about this post?

Do tell a friend to tell a friend to check this blog out.

Thanks for stopping by ❤