You have been hacked

Last week while I was in Stockholm for a speaking gig, my friend Steve Johnson sent me an email with the subject line: "Have you been hacked?"

Oh crap!

In his email to me, Steve kindly shared a screen grab of a nasty message that popped up when he tried to visit my site. He also pointed me to a Google diagnostics tool that contained all sorts of very bad news.

Yikes!

It looked bad indeed.

But how the heck should I know if I've been hacked? I am clueless when it comes to what's going on under the hood of my site. I hardly know the difference between HTML and LOL. And I'm sitting in a hotel room in Stockholm.

But I do know how important it is to fix an issue like this. Can you imagine the hit on my credibility as a marketing guy if a nasty error message popped up when someone was looking at my site because they might want to hire me to speak? Not to mention what the search engines were doing to me because of the suspicious activity.

So I shot a Twitter DM to Jim Stewart, a Melbourne SEO expert who works with me to make sure that my site is optimized for search engines. Jim was about to go to sleep after a soak in his hot tub and a glass (or two) of McLaren Vale Shiraz but being the responsive guy that he is, Jim jumped to action in real time.

Working with his team early the next morning, Jim quickly isolated the issue as being a hack affecting other sites hosted with GoDaddy like mine. Within hours they had solved the problem and I was back up and running safely.

Not only are Jim and his team genius, they are real-time genius.

If you want to learn about the specifics of the hack, how it was fixed, and the SEO implications of an issue like this, check out Jim's blog post Godaddy Malware – sokoloperkovuskeci.com

Do your suppliers jump out of bed for you?
Do you wake up early for your customers?

I found it interesting that more than 24 hours after my problems were solved, I got an email from GoDaddy support with the subject line "Important Information About Your Hosting Account". The email said that the GoDaddy “Information Security Team detected suspicious activity within my hosting account.” The email outlined what they discovered, how they helped, and actions I needed to take.

Too late, GoDaddy, Jim already solved the problem.

How quickly are you fixing customer issues? After all, we are living in a real-time world.

Comments

[Dave Delaney]

I've had this happen once, where a file was hacked on my WordPress blog. I had no idea either, a friend pointed it out to me.

It's nice to know we have smart people we can count on to inform and help us, eh?

I wonder if there is a way to be alerted automatically, like something in Google's webmaster tools. Hmmm...

[Jim]

always a pleasure. Interestingly Godaddy was realtime on their twitter feed but not with directly contacting customers. I think a few "billable hours" went into their email.

[David Meerman Scott]

Dave -- indeed - having smart people to help is key.

Thanks again, Jim! I think you're right that the lawyers had to get their hands on the communications.

[Dtippetts]

My reaction to this story:

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[David Meerman Scott]

Dtippetts -- WOW Wow wow -- that is incredibly cool. Thanks for taking the time!!

David

[Ricardo Bueno]

Getting hacked is no fun experience. Happened to me a few weeks ago... I wouldn't know where to start. But like you, it's nice to have a few friends. I reached out to @dremeda and the folks at Sucuri Security. They worked over-time and fixed the issue in just a few short hours.

I wouldn't have met them if it wasn't for Twitter and events like WordCamp.

[corrine]

If someone is interested here can learn about facebook hacking, potecting
facebook account and interesting Tutorials. if you dont interested in this skip the coment and sorry for disturbing.
http://hack-the-facebook.blogspot.com/

[Matt A]

This thing happens but there is always a cure to the problem. If you are running wordpress you can easily re-install if there is file missing issue that would be solved.