What a friggin’ weekend it’s been.

On Saturday morning, it was really the first time I’d been able to sit down and open up my laptop to get to work on editing the last wedding we photographed before we moved, and to check out our stats and see how we did while we were traveling.

Imagine my surprise when I saw we had gotten absolutely NO TRAFFIC the last 6 days. Absolutely not a single click to our site. Even on a terribly slow day, we still hit at least a couple hundred site clicks a day. So immediately I panicked thinking our site was down and no one had told me!

But no … it was even worse than that.

This week, a group of “white hat hackers” attacked over 1.5 million WordPress blog users, and according to what we’ve been told by our support team, they’ve inflicted some serious damage across the internet. I’m not a super technological person so when I was reading all the articles I could find on what happened, I didn’t understand a lot of the jargon; but, from what I could understand there was a critical update to WordPress that was released, and if users didn’t do the update than they could be at risk for hackers. The hackers could then go in and deface your site and/or add malicious coding. What the point of doing that is, I don’t know … but that’s the basic gist of it.

Well, as you guys know – we were moving last week. I didn’t crack open my laptop once (hell, I couldn’t even get to my laptop, as it was packed and buried in our household goods) … so obviously, I wasn’t able to do the update.

And we were hacked.

I’m really not an incredibly private person – I’m kind of an open book … but I’ve never felt so violated on the internet. Knowing someone maliciously went in just to destroy something? I can’t even wrap my mind around that kind of activity. And worse, I had no idea what to do when you’ve been hacked on a WordPress blog.

I’m just sitting here like …

What To Do When You’ve Been Hacked

Once I figured out that we had indeed been hacked, I immediately set to work to figure out what the next steps should be, and this is exactly what I did:

1.) I changed our passwords on everything related to our website and blog.

2.) I went in and updated our version of WordPress, and updated all the plug-ins.

3.) I contacted our website host, Showit, to let them know about the attack. They immediately got to work making our site safe again, removing the malicious coding for us and had us back up and running again within a couple of hours. If you don’t have Showit already, this is just one of the million reasons why they are the best website hosts ever.

4.) I contacted our SEO guru, Ben Turner with Turner Web Services and he was able to restore our Google Analytics, assess the damage inflicted and hopefully in the next few days, Google will know we’ve been fixed and it’ll be back to normal.

But what if you don’t have awesome support for your website, and you have to do it yourself?

Google has an awesome tutorial to give you step-by-step instructions on the action steps you need to take to fix your site. It will take some hard work and time, but it is fixable!

The key is figuring HOW they got in, WHAT they did, FIXING it, and then letting Google know!

And I just want to say …

THANK YOU!!!

To everyone who texted or messaged me, the amazing support team at Showit and Turner Web Services … Without you, I’m 100% sure I’d still be in panic crisis mode trying to figure this shit out.

And to the hackers out there? Jack Black says it best …