Last night this blog, Work From Home Business Blog got hacked.  Yes, even just barely a few weeks ago, I had seen 2 of my friends’ blogs got hacked. One of them Yan’s, who got hacked, restored it and came back telling everyone about it in his now much talked about post “The Day I Got Hacked“. The other, a lady whom I cannot disclose her name for reasons I will mention later in this post. Oh yeah, it looks as though I’m close to following Yan’s footsteps in writing this post about how my blog got hacked. But first, I ought to rephrase the first sentence to ” Last Night this blog, Work From Home Business Blog Got Hacked….BY ME“. How it happened (11:30 p.m.) I had heard so much about the Threaded Comment Plugin and I wanted to install it on this blog. Somehow even though I could successfully activated the plugin, it didn’t work and the comments displayed looked exactly like before. I checked around for help and was told that I’ve got to replace my original comment.php file with the new one. I did that and as a result a fatal error occurred. The next thing….I lost my blog. I’ve been hacked….by myself. Call for HELP….(11:40 p.m.)

• After trying just about everything including back tracking what I did and trying to undo the damage, this didn’t work. Work From Home Business Blog remained lost, and Ive got myself to thank for.

• I then resorted to contact my host (Host-4-Profit), and knowing that I’ve  a daily blog database backup helped ease some of my nerves now building up. But expecting to hear some good news, Murphy’s Law took control as the H4P guy told me the best option was to seek help from Wordpress and that restoring the data from the Wordpress tables in my database backup may not resolve the problem too. As I didn’t know who to turn to in Workpress, relying only on my intuition and to expedite things, I insisted that he did the data restoring from my back-up files I sent him.

Database Restoring in Progress(1:50 a.m.) So as there was nothing much I could do,  I decided to turn in for the night or morning. As sleep came, the good news is that it did take my mind off it, but the bad news is that the nightmare came too. I dreamed that the guy told me ” Your blog is gone…finished’ but another guy said ” Hey your WP-database backup helped, BUT…” (alarm rings!!) Awoke to get Good News or Bad News (6.40 am)

• Afraid of the outcome, and feared the worst, I decided to check my emails first to find out the news from the H4P guy. The email said ” Restoring the database from your WP Tables did not solve your problem”. My heart sanked.

• But wait, there was another email from H4P guy and it read “OK, restoring the files from our backup on October 8th appeared to resolve the problem as I can now access it”. That to me were the sweetest 21 words I could ever have dreamed of.

My Blog was down from 11.30 p.m to 2.50 a.m. The “guy” you hear me mentioned about is a certain David Grimes from Host-4-Profit, my host which has never really been tested until last night. I guess when it came to the crunch, it delivered. David, if you are reading this post, thanks again for your great help and support. What you can learned from my painful experience:

• Start backing-up your blog database today using this WP-Database Backup Plugin. Don’t wait for any day longer. You’ll never know when it might happen to you. Installing this plugin is simple. In my case if I didn’t have my backup files, I would have 5 days of data as H4P’s last site and database backup was on Oct 9.

• Find out some useful information about how often it does site or database backup. That should give you added comfort to what you already have as a database backup.

• Find out from your host how you yourself can backup your website files from your webpanel if you don’t already know.  It’s best to do this backup at least twice a month.

• Before changing any business-critical element of your website or blog, do backup for both your website and database. That way, it is fairly quick to restore it to the state it was in right before the problem arose.

If it could happen to me, it could happen to you too

First Reactions on blog hacks recently: Yan: “Who the hell did this to me?” The Lady I mentioned (unnamed to protect the incident): ” To the one who did this to me….I give you my 2 fingers…” Me: “OMG What did I do to deserve this?” Although it was a painful experience for me, on hindsight, it could have been a lot worse if I did not install my WP Database Backup Plugin and receive my daily back-up sent to my email inbox everyday. This was something I felt relief and comfort even in the midst of all my worrying and excited moments. Do you have any such similar experiences to share.  Do you have any suggestions on how to be in better control of future blog hacks that we see so often today. I really like to hear your thoughts.

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