One day last week while eating my lunch and scrolling through Facebook, I came across a posting from my friend D’Ray that was totally out of character. Instead of the usual photos of his grandsons and family gatherings, his post featured a rather enticing young woman on all fours crawling across the top of a bed. The caption contained some information about this gal with a link for more information.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and her mere presence on my friend’s page gave me all the information I needed – he’d been hacked! So, I sent him a text letting him know and when he responded later that day we joked about Russian troll farms hacking his Facebook page.
That seemed really funning until this past Tuesday when, in the midst of the many birthday greeting texts I received was one from a friend alerting me that she was pretty sure my blog had been hacked and she’d received more than thirty-five emails as a result.
At first glance I didn’t find anything amiss on my webpage. Then it occurred to me that if the emails had been generated to my subscribers, there must have been bogus posts somewhere. So I did some more digging and located more than thirty posts tucked away in my history back in June. In short order I deleted them all and changed my password. This morning I did a second sweep through my site and discovered a new user had been added to my profile. One quick click of the delete button and now they’re gone.
For the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hack my blog. My twenty-some subscribers is hardly a massive market. My guess is that I was merely among a bunch of other small sites that were targeted.
So, I apologize to all of you whose mailboxes were filled with bogus blogs and links to who-knows-where. I’ve done everything I know to prevent this from happening in the future, but let’s face it, there are too many folks out there who know a lot more about this stuff than me who are determined to cause mischief.