APOLOGIES: Our Site Was Hacked!

Posted on December 19th 2009 | By Ambassador

An anonymous person hacked the forum section of our website and posted inappropriate sexually explicit materials. We shut the forum down as soon as we discovered the problem, and we are now working with our SP to track the identity of the perpetrator. We, think few people were exposed to the images, as we were in the holiday season, and our traffic was low. If however, you saw the offensive images, we offer our sincerest apologies, and we believe the problem is resolved. However, the forum will remain down until we find a more secure forum platform.

Dear Larry,

The monitoring system on your server has detected an upload, via FTP, to your account that matches a known hack attempt.  In order to protect your account, we have stopped the upload and blocked the IP address that was attempting the upload.  For most sites, we can block all of the hack attempt, but please review your site immediately to verify it has not been altered.

IP Blocked: 6*.***.***.**

Unfortunately, this does indicate that your FTP username and password have been compromised and we reset your FTP password to protect from further attacks.  Please see below for your new password.

Files infected: /home/kings**/******/******/index.php

InMotion Hosting has made every attempt to secure your account and restore the content from our backups.  If there is any unusual content still on your site, our backups will have held the exploited content and cannot be recovered from our systems.  To correct the issue, you will need to restore a backup or local copy.  Keep in mind, the list is not exhaustive.

Based on a large number of similar situations, the most likely way the attempted hackers gained your username and password was due to weakness in a combination of several products on your personal computer.  We have not been able to verify exactly what combinations are a problem but please make sure your personal computer is up to date for all software and specifically including:

Adobe Acrobat Reader
Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Shockwave
Any FTP Programs including Filezilla FTP and WS_FTP