Feb 042014
 

 

Dear Reader: The site is facing some technical issues. Kindly bear till we sort them out.

Thanks

desi Traveler

Fortunately we are back and the site is functional once again.

So here is an update: desi Traveler was hacked and some malicious code was inserted in to word press. The code had more than 50 links to spammy sites. I discovered it accidentally while searching for some information and saw this screen shot with desi traveler showcasing things like Viagra, Cialis, Loans etc.

hacked site in google

Hacked site visible in Google with unwanted words

Needless to say I could not understand what is happening as I don’t know much about technology and am a very basic word-press user. So I posted my query on a blogging forum and got this screen shot showing all kind of spammy links  in dT from Vijay Prabhu, who was helping me online. I panicked after seeing so much Viagra in my blog that I could have opened a shop for that. But as I am not in business of selling dubious medicines, I wanted to remove these unwanted links from desi Traveler asap. I was so worried that I started calling Vijay as Vinay :p in my tension.

screen shot with spammy links

Screen shot with all kind of spammy links 

To be honest I could not sleep whole night and was trying to resolve it but of no result.  So finally I got in touch with Pavan Somu , one of the tech support geeks and blogger that I know, and who has helped me in the past also.  Well needless to say Pavan who manages many word press and blogger sites including the immensely popular Geek and Blogger was able to solve my problems. I am not sure how he did it, he basically remotely took control of my machine and resolved the issue.  So if you are a blogger like me and struggle whenever your site faces any kind of technical issue, Geek and Blogger is a site I would strongly recommend you to follow.  Hopefully desi Traveler will remain clean now without any issues. But one needs to take all kind of precautions, which  I have taken as suggested by Pavan.

All said and done it was a nightmare but also a great learning experience, that I wish none of my fellow bloggers will have to face ever. It is a big problem if your site is hacked and all your hard work is down the drain. Fortunately I was able to recover desi Traveler with help of my tech savvy friends.  Was your site hacked ever? What measures you take to protect  your website or blog, do share in comments.

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  15 Responses to “Some Technical Issues: Site Hacked and Recovered”

Comments (15)
  1. That’s a scary situation. Very informative blog. So what precautions should a blogger take to avoid this. Also how does one get to know that my website is (now) malicious.

    • I think it begins with strong password and then you need to actively manage and scan your blog for anything suspicious . There are tools available to scan your site.. we can discuss them one of these days as it is a full topic in itself beyond the scope of this comment

  2. A blogger’s nightmare..Thanks for sharing and raising awareness about the issue.
    Are you following some tips so that it does not happen again (God forbid)

  3. Man it has happened to me as well over past, but thankfully got it corrected. I know how it feels that is why my backup frequency as well as changing for Passwords frequency is once in 45 days for sure. My site was even declined from Google and chrome never opened it stating there is malicious and all that in Ladakh – Spiti seasons so you can understand 😀 😀

    Since, I come from technical background so got into the code and found all files being infected. Changed all my Passwords and it came back live. Even indiblogger rejected the presence of site 😉 .. So, those few days were horrible..

  4. Thank God! And I loved the last line of your post.

  5. funny :), Blue pill works for blog too 🙂

  6. Thanks for the mention sir. Glad to be a part of recovering the blog to the normal position. We are all bloggers under one family and I love helping my family members 🙂

  7. Thank God – Happy to see DT back ! reading this itself is an interesting learning. I think this Viagra is so powerful that it made its entry in DT too … lol

  8. i disassociated with all my word press blogs most spam and hack prone ,,,i prefer blogspot or tumblr ,,,

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