The Hacking (As I Understand It)

If you tried to visit my website in recent days, you were disappointed. I’m sorry about that. A hacker took my site down.

My friend and web guru Tom warned me a while ago that my site was vulnerable to hacking. I had been paying extra to my host, GoDaddy, to beef up security and prevent hacking and domain hijacking. Still, someone got in the back door and tried to change my domain name. That took my site offline and started a couple of days of phone calls, emails, and confusion for me.

Why did no one at GoDaddy mention the domain name change? That would have tipped me off that something was afoot. I was four customer service reps deep before someone finally admitted my website was hacked.

There was another problem. As a technical person was working to restore my site, a flurry of emails came in that used language I didn’t understand. I assumed that it was all part of the process and went on with my evening. The next day, when I inquired about why my site was still offline, I received a terse response. I was told that I didn’t complete the final step. Instructions were in my email.

Why didn’t someone follow up with me? I’m not a web creator. I don’t speak code and I can only manage broken geek.

I got back on GoDaddy chat with a nice guy who also said I needed to do that thing that meant no sense to me. When I said I didn’t know what that meant he responded with, please wait and I’ll do that for you.

Why didn’t they just do that in the first place? When they finally restored it, they didn’t do it properly and the pages came back with errors and glitches and it was a real mess.

I have been with GoDaddy for several years because it’s where my late friend E plopped me when he built my website. (Read more about E HERE. He was like no one else I’ve met.) Their reputation is good, their rates are semi-reasonable, and they’ve been responsive when I’ve needed them. So I stayed.

However, E hasn’t been around to trouble-shoot the site he built. Some parts of it are so out of date, they’re obsolete. Tom has been devising workarounds to keep it operating as smoothly as possible, but hackers have been knocking on the back door and preparing to bust in.

And now they have. To what end? Who knows! I don’t know what they want with little old me, but I have noticed a steady increase in spam. All kinds of spam. Foreign language spam, attempted scams of all kinds. All coming through my contact page. Is that related to the hack? I don’t know.

As we do know, life tends to get in the way. I carried on with mine without deciding about moving my site to a safer place. A hacker made that decision for me.

So, thank you for your patience and for coming back despite the glitches. Now Tom can put my site up on the hoist and look at the chassis. That’s how it works, right?