I may appear to have been a bit quiet for some days but believe me I’ve been swearing quite loudly!

Just over a week ago, and about 60 minutes before we were off to Cheddar for a weekend, I got an urgent call from my ISP; someone had hacked into my website and converted it into a phising site. The sort that pretends to be a bank and then wants to confirm your passwords etc. which are then forwarded onto the criminals behind all this. I had two options a) Pay my ISP £75.00 +VAT per hour to clean all my files, or b) Do it myself. I opted to do this myself which is why the site was inaccessible last weekend – it couldn’t stay up as a phising site. On Monday I went through every file removing code which had been inserted into many files, I’m not very competant with php coding but did my best. End result was that by the end of Monday I’d managed the job, my ISP was satisfied that all exploits had been removed and I was back up again. Hurrah!

Next I had to think about how to prevent this happening again. I can’t be sure but I think the hacking was done via the ‘Comments’ facility within my blogging software, this where some of the code was and also where the site itself didn’t act as it should. I wasn’t really able to repair and restore as original these files. The software was pMachine which is now obsolete having evolved into ExpressionEngine. It seemed logical to move the site onto using ExpressionEngine software but as I did this I found I didn’t like ExpressionEngine much anyway, plus it didn’t import the previous data very well even though it wasa direct replacement for pMachine. WordPress seems to be the major player but it has no import facility for pMachine databases. However, Googling found a way it may work and by jove it’s worked. There’s a lot more I want to do but at last I’ve got an up and running blog on WordPress now.