This time one of my sites that makes me money got hacked. It is a pretty large site with hundreds of products. Gets only natural traffic. Yesterday I went to check on the site and found my index file had been defaced. These are the steps I took

  • I logged in to my FTP program (Filezilla) and blew the site
  • Went to my backup folder on my computer and uploaded all the files.
  • I got it back to where it was 98%. (Some links are broken)
  • It is up and running again. It took me 20 minutes to do this.

What I did not do was to check if only my index file was defaced or Iframe was injected. I learnt about Iframe only this morning. It is something very nasty.
“After they put the iframe code into that person’s pages, anyone visiting that site will be redirected to the hackers infection site, where the person’s computer will be injected and infected. The hackers are depending on site owners not knowing their sites have been hacked so that the number of hacked sites will grow (as they have starting in Italy) into the tens of thousands… Please don’t think you can depend solely on your antivirus software to protect your computer. It more than likely won’t help you. For $1000 dollars, the russian hacking bulletin boards are offering Mpack with 1 year support and a GUARANTEE that virus programs will not catch the keyloggers. SO, keep your virus program updated, but don’t depend on it completely!”  – This is from a digitalpoint thread.
Solution
If you are facing this problem and your administrator says it is only your account, just change the FTP password and it will stop. Just changing password is not complete solution but is the first step.

What next?  Your password is leaked that means your computer is sending out the passwords, so I would suggest you to do a clean format first and then install any antivirus of spyware which you think could block it. But the best solution is to clean format the computer.
Just do these two things:

1) Change the FTP or root password of server
2) Clean and format the PC

Things to do

  • Always backup your files to local hard drive. (saves you a lot of pain)
  • Keep your antivirus up to date.
  • Use password generator and change password often and don’t use the same password for all sites
  • Keep password secure

I use Roboform and Pareto antivirus to keep me up to date and I still got hacked! Got to step up my security.