Bloranges.com hacked!
Blogging, Forum and CMS software definitely take the hard work out of publishing websites. While you can always create a free account at blogger for a blog, installing your blog on your server gives you awesome power to modify and customise. However, it is easy to neglect the downside of installing and running complex software on your server – vulnerabilities.
“With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility”
- Uncle Ben to Peter Parker
The more complex a system, the more chances of errors, bugs, and other vulnerabilities creeping in. If you have any custom software like Wordpress, Joomla, PHPBB, vBulletin, CMSMS etc. installed, you really really (really) need to keep it updated.
If you run many websites (like I do), you can easily forget to keep the software on them up-to-date. But the consequences can be nasty!
Bloranges.com was hacked recently. There was no visible change to the site, but a Denial of Service (DoS) script was installed, that would attempt to take the server down.
Thanks to Jeremy K, who pointed out the hack for me. I’ve fixed stuff for now on most of my websites, but one. I’ll get cracking on that soon.
So folks, don’t fall prey to the it-won’t-happen-to-me syndrome.. and yes, please take regular backups!