How Google Helped Us Recover From Being Hacked!

In case you didn’t visit http://www.articlesnatch.com today – we were hacked – they found two template files and changed them to redirect to other sites. One was changed to redirect to a geocities page – which by the time i found it – was over its bandwidth… thank goodness for small favors… the other is just an ip address so who knows what is there.

But while that was cool for them and i hope they got their kicks out of it – and sure I lost some ad revenue for the day – the more important thing is that I was able to fix it in about 3 minutes – without having a backup. I’m on the road right now and don’t have my regular set of back up template files handy (note to self keep these files saved on another server).

So here is how I fixed it thanks to Google.

Step 1: find the files that were compromised.
Step 2: search in google – site:domain.com (your domain)
Step 3: click the cached copy
Step 4: view source – and fix your hacked template file
Step 5: repeat for other template files that were hacked.

So in just a few minutes the site was back up and running all thanks to google’s cache system.

Hope you never have to use this information – but if you do – I hope this saves you some time.