Attacked

Over the last week or so, D4D’s been getting attacked from Sources Unknown, which has made things into a real Pain In The Chuff.

More worryingly, it turned out that my hosting company haven’t been keeping decent backups, and managed to not notice a bundle of key files being changed (repeatedly) on the sites I have with them.

Now OK, I’d been slack, and had a lot of those domains all under one username/file-owner , which was lazy of me, and shouldn’t have been done.  (On the other hand, having to remember a different username/password for each site/domain is… complicated, and leads to people writing down far more stuff than they should. Swings and roundabouts)

So there’ve been a number of remedies and updates I’ve been going through, but there were still facets that weren’t working – mainly because of those key files that got over-written, and that either weren’t backed up, or weren’t backed up regularly enough.  (Needless to say, that’s now changed – I’ve got backups in various places, so it shouldn’t happen again)

It’s ended up with a scorched-earth strategy, where I’ve effectively changed everything that’s possible – new username/password, new file-owner name and password, new folder location, and then reinstalled everything in a completely fresh clean copy of WordPress, and only then updating the config file to use the same database as before. And even the database tables have had their references changed.

It’s now all back and operational, and there’s been a fair amount of learning/remembering along the way.  But honestly, I’ll be very happy to not have to do that again for another decade or so!