My webhost, InMotion, was hacked early this morning. The hacker was able to replace the index.htm files in nearly all of my directories (and it seems a lot of the other folks using my host) with their own index.php. I’d hesitate to suggest there’s anything fortunate about this, but at least they seem to have left content more or less alone. The index file is basically just a document that collects and displays information but it doesn’t contain any content, per se, except in the sense that all the code that tells the document what to display doesn’t write itself.

So the fact that all of my photos and music and blog posts were unmolested is good, because I really don’t have much in the way of a current comprehensive backup. Recreating all that stuff would have been technically possible, although not really feasible. But since they deleted the index files and I don’t have a current backup, I’ll have to rebuild the main page from something old I might have kicking around. My host claims they will restore from their most current backup, so I’m going to wait a while to see what they can do before I spend any time doing it myself. Luckily the blog index file was a simple download from WordPress and replace fix. It doesn’t do much beyond a standard call for a bunch of secondary PHP files that weren’t harmed.

I’m not sure what the motivation behind the attack was, other than to simply do it because they could.

Blah, so a little bit of a bummer but it could have been worse. My initial reaction to the hacked site was unpleasant though. I’ll definitely be more diligent on the backups from now on, and keep my fingers crossed. I think this is going to continue to be an ever more regular fixture of life online.

UPDATE:
Can I just say, hell yea?! I was able to recover the main index.htm code from my web browser cache. HOLLER!