Have YOU Been Hacked?

Hey everyone!  A little over a month ago my blog was hacked.  A royal pain in the ass!  I went through the logical steps to get it cleaned up with my server and tech girl.  Everything seemed to be clear and I was off and running after being off line for about 2 days.  No biggie – I mean I was pissed that someone thought there was something to be gained by busting into my site and messing it up but it was fixed pretty quickly so I moved on.  Until about 8 days ago when I discovered that I could not find any of my media.  I immediately contacted my tech girl, who is great!  She stopped what she was doing and checked out the blog and reported that it still looked clean.  BTW, we’d installed some secondary protection after the first hacker attacked.  But this was the beginning of my nightmare.  Have YOU ever been hacked?

I’m not going to go into detail because the purpose of this post is to first, make you aware of what happened and secondly, to apologize to anyone who this might have negatively affected.  I still do not understand precisely how my blog was infected with 2400 malware viruses – bots.  I do not like bots!  What I do understand is that these viruses completely screwed up my site for over a week, caused me sleepless nights and a boatload of bucks to have it manually cleaned up.  Today I think I am safe.  I now have even more ongoing protection on my blog to hopefully prevent this from recurring.

I can tell you I drank plenty of wine in the evenings as I wrung my hands wondering how and when this mess would be cleared up and I could begin to blog again.

I have some exciting news to share with you in my next few posts.  I hope that you haven’t been too discouraged, that you are willing and happy to be back and hang with me!  If you see that google still has me “blacklisted” – you know, when you see “this site may have been hacked” under The Orange Bee in your search engine – rest assured I’ve done all I could to clear and clean up this crap.  Don’t be scared – come back soon – that warning will be removed in a few days – Google will of course have to check out the clean up – as they should.  If you’ve ever experienced a serious hack job or even a small one I’d love to hear all about it.  I definitely will understand!

It’s all good now and I am elated to back at my desk, writing and visiting with you.  Now in celebration of my nightmare having ended, I think I’ll go have a glass of vino!