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The Flicker Blog and Podcast

Subscribing to the podcast will keep you up to date with all of the new Flicker material as it gets released. The blog itself will contain all manner of things about music and user-experience design.

Archive for the 'Security' Category

You have been hacked

Monday, August 21st, 2006

So today I woke up, ready to start my new job, feeling relatively relaxed. After checking my emails, I looked over several changes I’d made yesterday to my site, only to find the message ‘You have been hacked’ in place of both my blog and index page!

My initial response was one of mild irritation, which was quickly followed by concern. Was this due to my installation of WordPress? Was my blog lost forever? Fortunately, the answer to both questions was no - a kernel upgrade and security upgrade on the server was all that was required; and backups restored the site to a fairly recent state. All I then needed to do was upload all of the files I edited yesterday (which weren’t included in the last automated backup).

Still, the whole experience was a bit of an eye-opener and has made me a whole lot less complacent. Not that I feel this blog has huge artistic merit, but if I lost it all, I’d still be pretty upset.

BTW - I have removed the URL from the image below because I’m guessing the site may have some malicious Windows hack on it - even if it hasn’t, the last thing I’d want to do is give the perpetrators any traffic.

Screengrab of Hack message