Well, the Patent Baristas website was hacked. Dang! I know everyone says this but I really didn’t think it could happen to us. We’re so small and do not have any commercial component, who would really care about hacking this site? It turns out that hacking is indiscriminate.
I discovered a malware on the website putting links all over and using my server for sending spam emails. We were able to handle the attack without major incident but the experience has certainly been frustrating.
I’ve learned a thing or two. It turns out that small businesses are a growing target for hackers. Forty percent of all targeted cyber-attacks are aimed at companies with less than 500 employees, according to the security firm Symantec. Also, with larger companies beefing up their protections, small websites are now the low hanging fruit.
Being hacked is a major productivity buster. While the breach was manageable, it was quite time consuming for me to coordinate between my hosting service, an internet security company and a WordPress expert.
It’s also been embarrassing. I found out we’d been hacked because readers gave us a heads up about malicious links and code they were seeing. What’s worse, my web hosting service even shut down my service due to the spamming emails until I could get the code deleted out of the site. I also wasn’t as prepared as I thought for getting back up and running. It took a fair bit of time to get the web site back up and running.
To all our readers, I offer my apologies for the inconveniences. I hope that you’ll stick around for more good things knowing that the site is now far more secure than ever in the past.
Just a quick shout out to some who helped:
- WordPress Expert Brandon Yanofsky
- Sucuri Security
- BulletProof Security
