How Easy Is It To Hack a Website?

We are finding out that it’s almost a piece of cake!

Last week (9-10-10) our sister company, how2arizona real estate, www.how2arizona.com was hacked. A multi-page, multi-page, many category website was reduced to the homepage (all okay) and every link from the home page redirected to a black & white message from someone perporting to be from Saudi Arabia, showing a middle-eastern warrior with gun…written message and audio of several voices spouting non-English conversations in the tone of threats.

No, we didn’t have the presence of mind to do a screen shot, but the redirect took you to a page that looked something like this:

One of our neighbors had gone to the “Open House” page to see what properties would be on display for the weekend and found they were redirected to the “Saudi” page. When I got on the site, not all pages were affected. By the time I got in touch with the host server, all pages were affected and I was still on hold with an entity who said they were a 24/7 tech support company. When I finally reached a voice, the voice confirmed I had been hacked, and then told me he did not have access to the server. The voice said to send the company an email, which I had already done. Note: the disclaimer of the email said someone would get back to the sender within 24 hours.

Next call: our IT person. Todd Michael is new to us. How did he measure up? Todd was able to get to the office, meet with me without interrupting my class schedule that day, pull down the site, scan it, find 3 potential entry points (1 trojan, and 2 email addresses that were not put there by me), and work me through the next steps.

Where to now…

Putting up the old site has its problem: did we really find the culprit?

There comes a time to make a + out of a -… to find the pony in the poop… to move on.

Our old site used lots of flash which is not read by Apple. We have selected a new theme (for WordPress.org) that will have no flash, be more interactive for the consumer and can be as content rich as the old site. We chose one of the elegant themes and are awaiting the initial review of the new site.

If you, like many people, are moderately techie, you get the gist of the damage. It’s about your time. Luckily we are a small company who could contact our people to let them know what happened and to let them know that we would be back up with a “remodel”.

Here are a few sites with great information about how a hacker gets to your site:

How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques from CMA Wire

Did Your WordPress Site Get Hacked?

WordPress Site Hacked… video

WordPress Padlock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoprPburnBU&feature=related

We hope this helps you…