Hacked by ImmortalBrain… Now what?
So for those who don’t know me, I earn a descent living straight
from online marketing Itself. But, I’m no multi-millionaire who’s out
there sipping margaritas on the coast somewhere.
So some hacker comes along, and kills the one blog i put my heart
and soul into that strictly has nothing but 100% free juicy tips & resources.
Aren’t you special Mr. Hacker boy!
So a bit of research reveals this is some hacker from the arab nations
and he’s doing this thru some wordpress exploit that exists in non
upgraded blogs. Cool eh? Not really.
Worse yet, they change the username & password on you, thus killing
your chance to go in and upgrade…
If your like me, you have access to a tool called PHP-MyAdmin within
your CPanel or some kind of control panel your web host gave you.
First thing, get back in your blog.
Check out this quick and fairly easy tutorial on changing your wordpress
Password using phpmyadmin .
Now, keep in mind, you haven’t locked the hackers out, you’ve just
gained access back in. Some say there are bots to install lurking still
within your code… GRR!!!! Don’t even ask my wife to repeat the words
I was saying when I discovered all this. It honestly blows my mind
what kind of punches a Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard can handle!
So, first thing I did perhaps a little paranoid was to change my
wp-login.php (found in the root folder of your blog) to wp-something.php
DONT use whatever I called it. I planned to re-name it back to
what I needed later but for now this works.
The next thing I did was go and change my:
/public_html/wp-content/themes/classic/index.php
Back to the one I originally had. Now my theme isn’t “classic” but
I’m not revealing that here. From what I Could tell, that was all
That was modified, but I didn’t take any chances on that either!
After making my mods that were there to both:
A: Preserve the image and look of the site so people could see
My content againa nd not the embarassing hacked graphic…
B: make as sure as i could no one could log in….
I started the upgrade process noted here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended
and… did the backup suggested here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database
I posted this document instead of the one I planned to Today just to
help anyone else that went thru this. I would hope many others way better
than my post come out soon, but for now this is probably better than
nothing, right? At least someone has now posted some helpful fix info.
Thanks Guys!
Dan Deyette
