Yesterday, a very dear online writer friend of mine mentioned on plurk that her blog was acting strangely. It sure was! When I checked it out, along with a dozen other people, what we saw was a page of content that went down in one cumbersome lump. One of the downsides of using Cascading Style Sheets. If the .css page fails to load, your site gets really ugly!

Not A CSS Issue?

Initially, I thought it was a simple problem and offered a simple solution to her plea for help. Unfortunately, the problem was no where near as simple as we originally thought. As she called in the troupes I set about scanning her files to check that the CSS file DID exist, it WAS being called/included correctly in the headers, the files required by the CSS file existed, etc. But as I was diligently checking these details someone or something was doing something very untoward.

Databases and WP-Admin Cookies

I’d reached the point where I was checking settings in the database. Now, most Web hosts make this easy with MySQL and phpMyAdmin panel. The database looked a little cluttered but everything should have been working perfectly. So, I logged out of the database to check into another area of the site that might be the culprit, the WP-Admin panel. That’s when I discovered that there was another issue. One we still haven’t truly nailed down. For some reason wp-admin was failing to store cookies and it’s failure to do so was leading to an endless loop as the site attempted to log in and attempted to log in and attempted to log in…

OMG! Malicious Attack!

It was time to check the database again so I logged back into phpMyAdmin and my jaw dropped. At least one, perhaps more of the databases were gone. Completely obliterated. They had been there earlier, I’d left them sitting their all nice and pretty, but when I returned it was as if they’d never existed. Someone has their grubby footprints in the backend of my friend’s site.

When you’ve had a malicious attack the first thing to do is to change your password. This, hopefully, bumps them out of your system and sends them back to step one, running keygens to try and discover the new password. You, of course, have selected a gobbledy-gook password of alphanumerics that no one could possibly guess because the truth is you just closed your eyes and threw your cat on your keyboard when choosing it. So, it means Mr. Nasty is held at bay and hopefully will give up and move into new pasture in which to make a mess.

But it still left us with a dilemma because you see while I’d gathered a backup of the original website we were having trouble with, there was no backup for those databases that were now gone. With no backup there is no way to restore the information of what could be weeks, or months, or years of data.

The lesson?

Back Up NOW!!! Honestly, don’t feel like this can’t happen to you. It can! You might be insignificant, your site might get a total of three unique visitors a week but tragedy can strike and you can lose your content. It mightn’t be a hacker, it could be a server fire, electrical failure, magnetic interference, or any number of culprits, the thing that’s important to remember is your site is not fail safe. Bad things do happen.

The Backing Up Process

1. Change Your Password
2. Copy your primary site directory into an archive file on your Hard Drive.
3. Load your phpMyAdmin and export each of your databases as single .sql files.
4. Zip the primary site directory files and your database files into a neat, dated, archive package.
5. Email a copy of this package to your online email address (such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc.).
6. Save the archive package to your external hard drive (you do have one don’t you???)
7. Burn a copy of the archive to disk and file it away from your computer.
8. Back Up Now, Back Up From Now On! (At least once a month, weekly if you update more frequently.)

Happy Ending?

To tell the truth, over 24 hours later and my friend and I are still working at damage control. We are waiting to hear from her hosting company in hopes that they can at least correct any server related issues. We could beg upon their mercy in the hopes they’ll do a full restore for us but the odds are slim. Yes, the host backs up regularly but they will not (generally) be willing to wade through their massive gigabytes worth of file structure to restore one users information.

I was able to bring the original site back online with it’s CSS intact. It looks pretty again despite not being currently hosted with the original host. We can only hope that this story will have a happy ending and we are already looking for the cosmic message in this tragedy.

Regardless of the outcome of this one case, don’t let it be you. Back up!

Have you experienced something like this? Please share your own experiences in the comments. How has having a backup of your files helped you? Have you had to learn this lesson the hard way like my friend did? Do you have other tips or ideas when it comes to site security and restoration? Share your thoughts!