{"id":4641,"date":"2025-08-20T01:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T06:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/?p=4641"},"modified":"2025-09-19T13:48:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T18:48:24","slug":"what-happened-on-august-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/what-happened-on-august-16\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happened on August 16"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>WARNING &#8212; TECH TALK AHEAD<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the early morning, I believe that there was an incursion which took the site off line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was the 4th incursion into the site; I didn&#8217;t tend to it immediately, but I was able to restore things by around 26\/August; most of the restoration came from restoring the backup.  The backup dated to early winter so I redid the lost pages (you will notice the -2 in the titles of the new versions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of the 4 incursions into the site, this was clearly the most pointless; nothing achieved except to make the site unviewable. Specialized files were created that kept users from accessing the site&#8217;s content.  I ended up removing over 1500 of these files (thanks to the creators of WINSCP software). Initially that did not work so I restored content from the last backup and a few other folders.  The site came back but stopped soon after so I discovered that non-Wordpress folders were also affected so I had to remove another bunch of files.  I suspect that were I aware of these other folders, I may have been able to bring the site up without restoring folders from backup.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When this sort of thing happens it is important to avoid seeing yourself as a victim.  You can almost always find out what sort of security lapses are the cause.  Here are the security failings that lead to the 16\/August incursion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Backups\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I typically backup when I install a new level of WordPress.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This is not enough, new policy is to backup after every second page is published.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>WordPress Upgrades\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>This was truly laziness on my part.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>WordPress updates frequently but features rarely change, the reason is that the updates are based on security problems.  I would routinely allow as many as 10 updates to go uninstalled. New policy is to update every time WordPress releases a new version.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>PHP Upgrades\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>This is actually laughably easy to manage using CPanel but I had to figure that out.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>WordPress warned me that I was out of date but I waited to resolve it.  New policy is to check for updates periodically.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>.htaccess\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>This is the name of the files that proliferated on the site &#8230; they are still appearing from time to time, I will be diligently removing them as they appear before they make the site unviewable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>With this message, I&#8217;ll return the Preview Page to normal operation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WARNING &#8212; TECH TALK AHEAD In the early morning, I believe that there was an incursion which took the site off line. This was the 4th incursion into the site; I didn&#8217;t tend to it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[329,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-329","category-site-rebuild","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4643,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641\/revisions\/4643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abelfamily.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}