Well, my site (GoogleFan.com) was hacked, but I figure I should blame my hosting service, in conjunction with this terrible American trait of never admitting to fault or failure…

Last week I got an email from RoutHost saying:

Please be informed that the CPanel password for your website has been changed as a security measure. The new password is as below:

It wasn’t until days later that I found out that my site had been replaced with a hacker message, which in part said:

GreetZ to all defacers and all redefacers : You sux ;) ._

If RoutHost had told me the complete story (ie “hackers gained access, please check your site”), I could’ve fixed up my site sooner - fortunately for me, my site was not affected in the long-term in any way.

Lessons learned:

1) Often with hosting you get what you pay for
2) Be it manually or automatedly, check your site every day!

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RoutHost have written to me and said:

Actually let me clarify why did we changed all the passwords on the server where your account is - few accounts got compromised indeed, so we did this as a security measure. When we searched why such accounts got compromised we found that most reasons were:

1) Old not updated scripts that were having a security breech. We’re strongly suggesting to our customers to have all their scripts up to date.
2) Having passwords in a publicly accessible files, which we find absolutetly unacceptable.
3) Easy to guess passwords. We suggest having at least 6 characters long password with combination of upper and lower case together with a number in it.