How My Blog Got Hacked

About a week ago, Digital Products Review, a blog where I am slowly breaking down how I make money through Clickbank, got hacked by someone from Georgia. Not the state, the country. It seems to be a trend. The guy must have collected a bunch of sites that he could get into and then hit them all at once. I have been checking over the last week and there is never a shortage of new blogs, forums, and other sites that this guy hit.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I couldn't rest until I found out how it happened. Well, I lie a little. I rested. In fact, I usually sleep like a baby, a loud baby, my wife would say. But it was the first thing on my mind every day, my big rock, until I had an answer. I needed at least something to look for.

That blog is a work in progress. After the overhaul of this one, I will move onto that one. I am currently teaching one person to create Adwords campaigns to promote Clickbank Products. It's pretty exciting and forcing me to dump worthless techniques. Teaching someone has improved my own methods, if only out of embarrassment. If any of you want to know how I make the money I do, check the blog out. But because that blog is not completely ready, I slacked on upgrading Wordpress.

I knew there was a security upgrade in one of those versions I skipped, but with new versions coming out every week, I really became tired of installing them. Somehow the hacker rewrote my stylesheet and deleted about 50 posts. Up to that point, I thought, "What are the odds?" Well, the odds smacked me right in the face. It seems every time I think something like that, I become the statistic.

This got me thinking about backups and Gmail. I had been sending complete backups through Gmail, but didn't realize until now what a good idea that was. Virtually unlimited storage, forever. I now do them daily for each blog.

This also made me love widgets more, because even though the hacker edited my stylesheet, he didn't mess up my sidebars because they were stored in the database.

Getting my blog back up was as simple as reinstalling Wordpress, importing the database, and finding a theme. It took less than an hour. It learned my lesson and from the look of the search above, others are still learning that lesson.