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What a world

7 years ago612 words

Apparently, someone exploited a security flaw in the code to defile this blog and delete all the posts. I've managed to restore everything from a backup, but still. What a lovely thing to happen.

I was aware of the flaw for a while, but never actually got around to fixing it due to the fatigue of depression. Instead I just had to leave a door wide open whenever I added a new post, and this time I forgot to close it again afterwards. It only took a couple of days before someone came in, deleted all my posts, and replaced them with some kind of shock gif that I thankfully didn't see.

I managed to restore everything by contacting my webhost, and I'll be keeping backups properly in future (I always meant to, but kept just putting it off) to ensure this doesn't happen again. I've also fixed the security issue, I hope, by adding a more secure login system for myself (the other system wasn't really a login system at all, and was far from secure).

I wish I could say that this is the first time something like this has happened, but a lot of my fears and misery have been... I won't say caused, but they've definitely been exacerbated by things like this that have happened over my years of running websites. I imagine it's a relatively common thing for any website owner to have to deal with - when getting the backup, I had to choose on a form from a list of reasons why I needed it, and "site was hacked/defiled" was right at the top - but isn't that an awful thing? That there are people like this in the world, and they're not even rare? They're the sorts of people who kick down sandcastles, I suppose. The more elaborate the sandcastle, the more fun it is to destroy it. I can't claim to understand the minds of such people. They baffle me. I mean, I can speculate, but I can never truly know what it's like to derive pleasure from such destruction. I worry endlessly about accidentally saying something wrong, yet people like this tear down worlds without apparent remorse. I suppose we all have our different flavours of mental illnesses. Hmm.

Anyway. A nice thing that came from the whole debacle was the support that emerged from it. When I checked my blog, I could easily have just seen the ruin left by the defiler... But instead, someone had used the same login exploit to clean up their mess, and had written an apologetic and encouraging post to me which very much took the edge off the whole thing. I mean, I essentially had an anxiety attack - right before an exam, too - but that helped me from self-destructing too much at the frustration of it all. Another person (or maybe the same one, I'm not sure) had commented saying they'd kept a backup of the site in case of such a thing happening. That's nice to know, too.

This blog is an odd thing to me... I never know if anyone else gets anything out of it, despite the comments. If it's worth saving when it's attacked like that, though, then that suggests it's of some value, and that makes me want to update it more. Hopefully what I've got to say is of some minor interest, even if my posts are long and rambling and often quite negative!

I'm still recovering from the mess of this, but I'm glad I was able to salvage the posts, and thank you to those of you who support me and read this thing!