What if you were hacked?

[Beverly]

What would you do if one day you logged into your forum and saw that your site was offline due to hacking or could not access your forum control panel due to hacking? How would you recover your forum?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

It has happened to the best of us!

I keep backups so I just restore everything, after checking to see what the source is of course. Usually its something stupid like me forgetting to update something.

I tend to stray away from having too many addons because of this exact reason 😉

 

[Thomasss]

I would take it all down in cPanel, and luckily I have regular backups now so I would just overwrite the files. I guess I don't really know what would happen if my forum was hacked, it's one of those things that you never think of or know how to handle until it actually happens, which hopefully it doesn't.

Anyone have stories on how they handled a hack?

 

[MrDawn]

In my case. Me having owned a forum would have ended much sooner than later seeing as I no longer have an interest in running my own.

 

[Gizmo]

I've been hacked before but there's a good thing called backups 🙂

 

[Nebulous]

I've been hacked before but there's a good thing called backups 🙂

Indeed.

My forum was hacked back when it was on MyBB (which is one of the reasons I switched to a software with a very good track record when it comes to security, XF).

Anyway, back on mybb, the hacker attempted to lock me out of the board by changing my password but that didn't really lock me out of anything since I could still get to my cPanel and whatnot. It was pretty easy to regain control and use a backup to fix things.

I don't know why people bother hacking forums when all their "damage" can easily be reversed. Seems like a waste of time. Why not apply those elite hacker skills to something useful, like reporting vulnerabilities to software makers? ...Perhaps they could even make some money for being able to perform "security audits" on different softwares and applications.

 

[WGSecurity]

I keep backups and test my security to make sure things like this dont happen.

 

[Cosmic]

Never been hacked, fortunately. 😛 It's good that forum software is much more secure nowadays. But if I were hacked, I guess I'd restore a backup.

 

[Gizmo]

What I have noticed over the years is webhosts are getting better and if you do get hacked they are able to restore a backup. Most hosts that I've been with have also recommended cloud flare.

 

[Rich Edmonds]

I'd utilize one of the externally stored backups to return the boards back to normal. Resetting passwords, ensuring access has not been compromised elsewhere. I would then attempt to monitor the situation to help prevent a repeated offence from occurring, as well as checking logs to see whether anything out of the norm was picked up.

 

[Cosmic]

Never been hacked, fortunately. 😛 It's good that forum software is much more secure nowadays. But if I were hacked, I guess I'd restore a backup.

I can now officially redact this statement. :lol: Not too much damage was done though, fortunately *knock on wood.* 😛