NeverBeg Situation, Please Read, Planning on Taking Action

[NeverBeg]

Yes NeverBeg was hacked, but the juice of the story is here.

Not more than 3 days ago, the joomla (content management) system of my site was hacked some what similarly to the hack that is on my site currently. All that was needed to fix the situation tho was to update to the latest version of joomla.

In addition to this, the technician of my hosting company who I was on the phone with at the time told me it would be wise of me to purchase a back up of my site, for the measely charge of $5. I told him, yes i would definitely want to do that for sure, what is $5 anyway?

ANyway, a day went by, and I was gone most of the day, working one of my many other jobs, to come home and check out and see that my site was hacked. Really ugly looking... At first I was pissed, but then remembered, that just the other day, I had my site backed up by my hosting company and figured they could restore it for me no problem...

Well I call the technical support, and tell them to put in a ticket to have my site restored to normal. Not too much later, I get an email saying this:

Trouble Ticket Response To Ticket #233239

Newest Response Sent on 2006-07-08 at 22:56:02 EST:

Hello, I apologize for the inconvenience, but I am having a hard time restoring your site from the backups we made on July 6. I am experiencing unrecoverable errors when attempting to uncompress the tar file. I have already refunded the $5.00 fee you paid to have this backup done, though as far as I can tell the technician who performed the backup did so successfully. Is there anything we can help you restore from the backup-neverbeg.com-6-6-2006.tar.gz backup file? Thank you in advance for your reply, - Robin Nelson Systems Administrator HostRocket Support I said to myself, your gonna refund me $5???? My site that I have put countless hours into, and spent big dollars to build and maintain, is now gone, and you are going to refund $5? I paid for a service to be done, and you are telling me that it cant be done?

Needless to say, I plan on suing hostrocket for the complete dismantal of my site. I have people who pay to advertise on my site, and my site believe it or not is worth a fair chunk of change as I have already been offered by people to buy my site. I know what it's worth, and plan on suing hostrocket for the damage.

If anyone has any experience in this, please post here, I plan on hiring a lawyer, and taking action immediately against this company. Any thoughts or comments or suggestions appretiated.

[dbirider]

Wow that's brutal. Is ANYTHING left of the site? If you still have all the databases then you're not completely screwed.

You have some pages indexed on google that you can get to by viewing the cached page. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...e:neverbeg.com

Good luck, and back your sites up at least weekly from now on!

[spektacular]

loser hack-nerds...they have nothing better to do with their life...

good luck bringin your stuff back.

Spek

[Georgia Poker]

You mean you never backed up your site? I don't mess with forum sites anymore but when I did, a daily backup was mandatory.

Sorry to hear about this man, I've lost a few pages here and there due to mistakes on my part but never a total loss. If you need any advice about suing for big bucks (remember our phone call ), give me a ring.

And what the hell is up with this guy who hacked the site? He's got a banner with an ID attached to it to feed the hungry?!? What, does he have some weird thing about hacking "bad" sites and helping the poor?

[GregK]

thats too bad

I'd suggest not wasting your time or money on a lawsuit though, bet they have their collective asses covered in fine print.

You were running opensource apps too, nobody is liable for anything on OS code. Especially since you neglected to update it.

Theres an old saying in this biz, "backup backup backup".
'yer website, DB's, any/all files that you edit, anything & everything on a regular basis

...or else

[Kyle]

Man someone really has it out for you.... if I can help msg me and I'll try.

[bmicon]

dude, CALL ME!!!!!!

[adioking]

backup

[AceHigh Pino]

Sorry to hear about what happened to NeverBeg bro. I loved the site concept, as well as the people there. Not to mention I bought a block ad that won't see the light of day this month it looks like . Its ok, though, Im sure we'll get that all settled regardless -- the most important thing is getting recourse for what this hosting company did to the site. I really hope they either A) Get it back up, STAT or B) Pay a big price for them not being able to get it back up and showing negligence in the process.

My site at P.O. was just hacked a few days ago, but luckily I had a friend that was able to recognize the problem, back trace it to the source, and then eliminate it -- we've since installed better updates to fight the same sort of problem in the future. Thats also the risk we take when we use sites that run off PHP-Nuke, SMF, or Joomla...they're all very vulnerable to easy run-of-the-mill hack jobs. Hell, even NWP got hacked for a few hours a couple weeks back...

Anyways, enough ranting...Ill holler at you later through email to see what's up. Hope you get everything straightened up. And please feel free to get in touch with me if you need any help with anything. Take care.

Pino

[indieangler]

Before saying that all is lost, I'd get a second opinion.

Get a copy of that tar file....it's probably just a standard cPanel backup. If it is, shoot the file to another member around here that has a dedicated server that uses cPanel and WHM and see if they can't restore the backup for you. If no one around here can help, take the backup to another web host and see if they can do anything with it.

I'd atleast make sure you have multiple copies of that backup file.....if it was backed up correctly I wouldn't think anything should be corrupted.