Dear WeatherCat web spinners,
A while back I had noticed that there were some additional PHP files in the root directory of my web server space. They had puzzling names. Even so, GoDaddy had provided me with some default PHP programs, I supposed they had included a few more and moved on.
This morning I received an email from the GoDaddy security team with ominous news. Somehow someone had hacked into my web server space and inserted those files. A security scan had detected the rogue files and some had been deleted because they were interfering with server operations. Others were left for me to ferret out. The files had names like:
html/dyan-crickets.php
html/happen-inane.php
html/incomplete-embarrassed.php
html/lonely-dorrie.php
These files were literally all over my directories and it took some time for me go through and delete them all. A .htassess file had also been added. Fortunately, I don't use the root directory of my web space so hopefully very little damage was done. The only devices that could have going there are web spiders. I made some attempts to determine what sort of attack had occurred based on the filenames but didn't turn anything up.
I still have no idea how the hackers got access and GoDaddy didn't recommend any changes in my server operations. I'm trying to lock things down further, but I'm running into trouble with the GoDaddy management software.
Since many of use run PHP based templates, this sort of hacking might be much more difficult to detect on your sites. I had hoped to disable PHP on my since I don't use, but I couldn't find any obvious way to do that.
The increasing sophistication of hackers is well-documented. One of the reason I gave up running my own LINUX server was clearly I was losing that arm's race. I'm disappointed that GoDaddy took weeks before noticing the files that I wasn't aware were dangerous. It would be clearly in their best interest to increase the frequency of scans and educate users about how this particular sort of attack works and how to prevent it.
In the meantime, we all must become more vigilant - even if we hardly have the time for that.
Oh well, . . . . . Edouard