Peter

Work At Home Ideas´s last blog post..The Night My Blog Got Hacked

The reason is, there are some special characters in these database dumps.

If you want to try, use your cpanel phpmyadmin tool to re-import your database if you need to. I’d google phpmyadmin.

UNiHacker´s last blog post..Blogrolling.com Hacked!

If you don’t change your theme often, just backup your template one time, then create or download a script to email you a database dumb every couple days.

Hacker Forums

Hacker Forums´s last blog post..Dutch Judge sides with Hackers.

Now that I’ve switched over to using the automatic update plug-in, I have to remember to back up changes to my blogs to my computer.

When my article directory was destroyed the last time, I tracked the culprit down to a local ISP in Egypt and turned over all my log files to the FBI.

Never heard back from them.

One of my other sites was destroyed by someone in Turkey. I submitted log files to the FBI for that one, too, but that was the end of it. I converted the site to a static HTML site and it gets some traffic and makes a little money, but not nearly as much as it was doing when it was an interactive portal.

I’m going to be closing down most of my blogs before the end of the year. It’s just too much work to keep them active and handle security, so the ones that aren’t earning their keep will be discontinued. I closed one today.

I’m not sure, but I think it was you who commented that I had very similar content on several blogs I was testing.

Now, I’ve acquired the data to be able to choose between them and go with the ones that rank and earn the best.

My life should get a bit easier after I get all that done.

All the best,

JD

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-10-02

Thankfully, except for the blogs, I have copies of everything that’s on every one of my sites on my computer. That’s why I think it’s important to be able to back up the blog content, so that you can easily add it back if you get into trouble.

Of course, it would be nice if all of us could be internet police and just track these guys down, wouldn’t it?

In most cases the home page was modified to redirect to a page espousing the hacker’s political viewpoints and/or they used a large graphic and showed it over the main page, which made it difficult to get to the controls for the site.

Sometimes this was done by manipulating the database and other times it was by gaining access and changing scripts and/or HTML files.

(Unless there is a need for your blog to allow people to register, such as if you have a team of writers and/or managers, it’s safer turning that off in WP.)

In most of those cases, it was not a simple matter of reloading the database.

I closed my 21st Century Articles site after it had been hacked multiple times over a period of several months. It just got to the point that it wasn’t worth it. I have too many other things to do than play those games.

Mitch, don’t think that relative obscurity (not meant as an insult!) protects us. There are scripts that search for sites running particular scripts that have security problems or other things that can be exploited. Some of the standard scripts that can be installed by Fantastico are regularly victims of hackers who find security holes or other exploitable vulnerabilities in the scripts. Since they are installed on millions of sites, they can be exploited more easily. That’s one of the reasons I’ll never again use PHP-Nuke to build a portal site.

I’ve had portals, blogs, forums, and other sites hacked. One site was practically destroyed because someone gained access through a photo display script I was using.

The point I’m trying to make is that just backing up the WP database regularly isn’t all you may want to do.

On a regular basis, you may want to make a complete backup of your site so you can restore the theme, and the contents of any directories you may have created, such as images, sound files, PDFs, etc.

To make this full backup (which does not include the WP SQL database), you’ll need to use FTP or a backup utility, if your host provides one.

Many of my sites are hosted on HostGator and they offer CPanel, as do many other hosting services.

In CPanel, just click on Backups, and then – under Home Directory – click “Download a home directory Backup.”

On one of my blogs, that downloaded a 3 MB gz file that should have everything for that domain, other than SQL databases.

On the same page, there should be a section called “Download a MySQL Database Backup” and it should show all your MySQL databases. One of those should start with “wrdp” and you can download the full database just by clicking that link.

I use the WP database backup plug-in you recommend, but I also regularly back it up from the Backups page, too.

Some of these databases can get rather large, which isn’t much of a problem if you have a fast broadband connection, but they can take quite awhile to download on a slow dial-in connection.

Still, it takes less time to download the backups than it would to completely recreate the entire site if it were seriously hacked.

Thanks for reminding us of what can happen and why we need to take steps to protect ourselves and make sure we have current backups that can be restored – hopefully – if necessary.

Don’t ask me about the time I lost two weeks of work for 30 word processors when I was backing up to a misaligned tape drive. At some point, to be sure of the integrity of a backup, it has to be restored, and that always entails the risk of losing your work, too, if it goes wrong.

One thing you may want to do now and then is to Manage > Export in your WP blog and export a full set of your blog’s postings. Then, if worse comes to worse, you can reinstall the blog, restore or reinstall the theme, and then import all the posts back in. I’ve used that successfully a time or two.

(Now you see some of the reasons I burned out totally as a systems administrator a few years ago.)

Maybe this will offer some more food for thought.

Act on your dream!

JD

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Where is my bail out?