We were hacked a few weeks before the site was ready to go live in the spring of 2020.
In all probability, a former web development client who refuses to pay us the money even her own lawyer acknowledges she owes us, and who is furious she lost the legal battle when she tried to use the Austrian courts to steal a site we were building for her was behind the attack.
Whoever was behind it, the hacker used a very small gap our security plugins didn’t fill to gain access to and destroy the site. Our hosting provider, SiteGround, found and closed the gap as soon as we reported the hack.
We have since switched to security plugins which fill that particular gap and several others our previous plugin missed. So, the site is much more secure now.
Here We Go … Again
Unfortunately, SiteGround couldn’t restore the site to it’s previous configuration. And, therefore, advised us to completely re-write it from the ground up.
We decided to restore as much of the site as we could in the hopes of saving time later. We managed to restore about 50% of our content. But will have to use our original files to recreate the other 50%.
At the moment, we’re creating placeholder posts for the missing content. And combing through all 10 domains of the partially restored site as we look for and fix settings and other issues which might cause problems further down the road.
Once that is finished, we will export all of the settings and content, then follow SiteGround’s advice by destroying the current site and starting over.
Not Quite From the Ground Up
Fortunately, we will be able to rebuild it reasonably quickly by importing the settings and content from this version.
Doing so is the only and fastest way to removed all of the malicious code the hacker may have left, and have the site up and running.
Patience Is Needed
Please, bear with us while we do this. There are tens of thousands of settings in a site this complex. And all of them absolutely must play nicely together. If they don’t, the whole site could come crashing down.