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Gone phishin’ — against my will
Within a day of my announcing to the world that I was back in business, my host suspended my site. Since that suspension also took down my site’s email, I received no explanation for their pulling the plug until I sent them an anxious message on Monday.
I had assumed that some glitch had delayed my monthly payment, but the explanation was much worse and more embarrassing. Hackers had entered my web server space and inserted files that were sending out those misleading messages from “PayPal” about your account being suspended or canceled. Youch!
So, my hosts caught on, since their server was no doubt spending a lot of time sending out emails through their SMTP service. To protect themselves, they suspended my account and my site until we could correct the problem.
This blogsite lives alongside another, nearly dormant site of mine oriented toward computers. For several years now, I have been a reasonably happy and competent user of php-nuke, an open source content management system (CMS). Nuke has a well deserved rep for being a security nightmare, but with care and skillful coding by technically adept users, it can be made into a safe, reliable CMS.
Almost. Several weeks ago, hackers exploited a weakness in one of php-nuke’s scripts and slipped past my site’s defenses to essentially wrest control of the site from me. I corrected the problem and restored the site from backups, sure that I had closed all the holes.
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