As a small business, busy and bustling, energetic and willing to try new things, GRS has embraced web technology with an updated website and a blog. We have even started a few forays out into Twitter.
We, like many in our position and probably like most who are less technologically savvy than us, assume that our website hosts are watching out for us. Be careful though, as this post will soon show you, that may not be the case.
For some unexplained reason, we had our website adulterated. Some php code had been injected into the source files, which added a bit of code at the bottom of each webpage which opened up (randomly) an iframe which forced viewers to another site.
We called the web hosting company. I informed them of the problem, mostly to tell them that they needed to look at their code because there may have been a problem. This wasn’t just for me, I thought that other websites could have been affected and I was making an altruistic move. It wasn’t appreciated to the fullest extent, and I was told for my troubles that it was probably just my site and I should change my password.
So I left it at that knowing what was going to happen next. Sure enough the next day, the files were infected again. I had changed the password before I even called the company, and run various virus checks, and so on. It was probably not my access. Finally they opened a trouble ticket but still insisted it was me, I should check my website scripts etc.,
At the end of this conversation with them through a support website, they wrote that there were FTP logs but other than that, no logs on anything else. So here I am writing this, several days after I have asked for the logs, waiting for them.
I suppose what I am trying to elucidate is this: the website host is concerned not about you, unless you’re paying through the nose for a dedicated machine, but rather their bottom line. Fine, I can understand business values like that, but remember if you ignore me and let my website get hacked like this, then turn around to blame me when I request something be done, it’s likely I’ll move to a host that does care.
Update: Despite the hosting company saying they had “searched” the site for any problems and coming up empty-handed, I managed to find the time to do it myself and found some base64 code hidden away. Clearly the hosting company didn’t do anything as running a simple find command coupled with a grep looking for base64 or common hacks would have found it in minutes.
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