Written by neobita | 23 September 2008
Posted in Knowledge - Error Solving

The Waklu! mainpage. Hacked! 

Well for me, it has always been "nah, that could never happen to me" or "My website is of no value, no way people gonna come and hack it". However, yesterday, while visiting here, to my surprise, my front page was changed to somewhat a page filled with the text "Hacked By Redmin". And so I say, "Oh man! my website's been hacked, Damn those hackers!"  So, like any tech kid who has a problem with his/her cyber life, I've gone to Uncle G for help .

In my findings, it seems that this hack usually infects websites done in Joomla!. My current version is 1.5.0, the latest version is 1.5.7. There has been an announcement in the Joomla! website that a reDMin Turkey hack has been found compromising security in some versions of Joomla, mainly those versions prior to the 1.5.6

 

As things gotten to a very risky endeavour, whereas I might loose the settings and posts in waklu, I've decided to ask my domain support for help. They were very friendly and had been a great helped from the beginning. At first, they have suggested to restore my website to a backup they made in previous month (August). That is one major surprise to me as they should have backed up the website once a week (Well, I was also to blame, as I have not even once backed up the website!) . I rejected this solution as I have some recent post and website alterations that I would dearly miss and too lazy to redo should they restore this website to the back up they made. After some time trying, they got back to me and have managed to enter my Joomla! admin panel using a fix username and a password. These are the steps I took to restore my website after that and my effort to close any loopholes / breaches that might be used by potential hacker.

- Once I got to the admin panel, I've changed the site offline mode to "no"
- I visited the Joomla website and downloaded the latest 1.5.7 patch
- Upgrade my Joomla installation to 1.5.7
- Search TeachMeJoomla for a way to change my Joomla password
- Change my Joomla core password

I hope that with the percautions I took in restoring my website will stop any other attempt to hack waklu.com .
Well, All's well and Lessons Learned  (should now start to backup all my settings and files

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