Yesterday, I received an email from one of my subscribers and he has a certain problem with his web site(s) – they were attacked by a hacker and the passwords to his FTP server and Cpanel had been changed… :
Hi again Detlev,
I have a small problem I am hoping you can help with.
2 of My sites are hosted with a particular company and their servers got hacked by a terr0rist supporter (unfortunately).
The problem is they destroyed data which allowed access to my sites via ftp and Cpanel, so I cannot access them.
Part 2 of the problem is that I have had several misfortunes with computers and I dont have a full back-up copy of these websites.
I have downloaded 4 different software applications to spider my sites, but they only pick up the index page and wont go any further. I do have many more pages on each site, but the software refuses to find these links.
Is there any way I might be able to spider my own sites so that I can find page names & links to all pages on my sites?
Can you help??
Sincerely,
Jason
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Here’s my answer, (I’m by no way a professional computer expert who has studied these things or some kind of certified programmer but this is what I would do based on my over 8 years of experience with web servers and web based applications as a user) :
Hi Jason,
I’m afraid that there isn’t much you can do. But I know how you can access your Cpanel and your FTP server again: You need to change the DNS to a different hosting company. If you’re like me then you probably have several different reseller accounts so adding the site to a different server should be no problem.
Now on to the problem with your content. If you have no backups, it can be kind of hard to put up the same pages on your new server.
“I have downloaded 4 different software applications to spider my sites, but they only pick up the index page and wont go any further. I do have many more pages on each site, but the software refuses to find these links. “
– The spiders need to find links on your index page. If there are no links, they cannot spider the site. OR if there are links then probably the pages have been removed or changed by the hacker. In this case, the spiders cannot find pages and don’t show them as results.
The only way I can think of to get the original pages back would be to go to: www.archive.org/ , enter your URL (s) into the “Waybackmachine” field, click “Take me back” and then hope that your pages were indexed by their spiders. You will then be able to view each individual page by clicking the links and then you can save the HTML pages to your harddisk again.
Possible problem: This usually will work only for older sites. If the sites were brandnew, you might have bad luck with it. In this case, there’s no way around to creating the site(s) from scratch again… ;-(
In order to avoid a hacker attack like this in the future, try to make your password as complicated as it can be. Save it into my PromoBuddy and just copy and paste it from there if it’s too difficult to remember. And then try to change it on a regular basis like once a week or so.
That’s what I am doing with my passwords as well (although sometimes I tend to forget it). I have been hacked several times, too. But since implementing these long passwords and regular changes, it hasn’t happened anymore (this is NOT an invitation to hackers who are reading this right now…!).
I hope, this helps.
Detlev
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