While we certainly don’t want to embarrass one of our customers, we must admit that one of the sites on one of our servers (which we won’t mention!) was hacked the other day. How did this happen at Hosting 123? Why did we do such a poor job to allow this?
Well, while we certainly are not proud of the fact that this happened on one of our lovely untainted servers, it must be said that a weak password makes all the difference in the world. Unbeknownst to us, the password for the admin was set to “admin1234” and as the botnets are busily working around the clock to try passwords endlessly, it was only a matter of time before this one was cracked out. Fortunately, as we take daily incremental backups, restoring the site to its original version was a piece of cake. Of course, we did go ahead and change that password, so no use in trying it again Chinese hackers.
As a result of this kerfuffle, we rolled out an additional security policy to deal with these pesty botnets, which blocks IPs that perform too many password attempts on any wordpress sites hosted by us. By the way, this hack didn’t result in any loss of secure data, but it did result in turning a pretty corporate site into a portal for pornography! So definitely a case to be careful about your passwords for anything and everything on the web unless of course you like those kinds of sites.