I Got Hacked

This site, as well some of the other sites I subhost, were taken down a few weekends ago. Someone had hacked my hosting space somehow and deleted many of the front-end files. Thankfully, no databased were affected. Bluehost had a very recent backup of the files I needed, so some sites were back to normal after I had reuploaded everything.

Ed’s blog just needed its permalinks rebuilt for things to go back to normal. Not a hard process at all, once the problem is pinpointed. Jaydinitto.com and hulud.com were a different matter, as they were throwing 500 errors no matter what I and some folks helping me tweaked.

When checking the error logs at the root folder randomly, I saw a bunch of these errors:

[blah blah] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected identifier “define” in [url redacted]/wp-config.php on line 2

Line 1 in wp-config.php looked like this:

Where the same line, plus the next one, in my backup looked like this:

PHP didn’t like a comment being on that first line, I guess, since just about everything worked fine, for both this site and Shai Hulud’s, after that comment was returned to the next line.

There are some small fixes to be made, but we are back in business. I should note that I don’t think I was specifically targeted, but it’s certainly possible. I don’t say anything very controversial on here, but I am a part of things that some would say are controversial, when in reality we are as harmless as doves. Oh well. The least the guy could’ve done was given me a sweet deface page, but I didn’t even get that. Maybe next time.