As those of you who follow me on g+ will already know, Papers & Pencils was recently hacked. To my knowledge there was no risk posed to visitors. No malware, or anything of that sort. Certainly, though, some naughty bois and gurls were running amok on my back end. Their primary goal seems to have been to upload hidden pages to manipulate Google search results for a bunch of Asian websites.
The most important thing I have to say about this is fuck Bluehost. I’ve spent well over $1000 on their services since I first set this site up back in late 2011. I’ve never required any significant assistance from their support staff, and their first suggestion to me in resolving this issue was that I sign up for an $800/year security protection plan. Failing that, they’d help me resolve the issue for a minimum payment of $300. Money my little tabletop blog doesn’t generate, and which I don’t have. That is some absolute horse shit, and I would not recommend their services to anyone.
Fortunately I have good friends. Thanks must go particularly to Robert Freeman-Day who held my hand through the process of deciding what I could do about the situation. Unfortunately the best solution we could come up with was to burn the whole house down.
That’s what this is. I’ve purged the files and the SQL databases. Everything is gone. That includes not only Papers & Pencils, but also Blogs on Tape. Whatever hole the hackers were using to get in ought to have been destroyed. That’s the hope anyway. My fingers are crossed, but we weren’t able to understand how they gained access in the first place, so we can’t say with any certainty that I’ve gotten rid of them quite yet.
I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrated I am about this. My work on this website is among the proudest accomplishments of my life, and I hate to have it disrupted like this. Everything is backed up several times over in redundant formats, and I hope that I’ll be able to get it all back online soon. However, I don’t know how much of the nasty google-manipulating pages were collected in my backups. There is a potential worst case scenario where I have to add everything back to the website bit-by-bit, copying and pasting it from my archives. It would be a tedious process. One I would have to balance out with writing new material for weeks, or even months.
I was really starting to get into that “Discovering Dungeon Moon” series as well. Go figure I only managed to get a single post out before this nonsense hit.
To make matters worse, all of this is coming at the worst conceivable time for me personally, with my day job keeping me too busy & exhausted to give this problem proper attention, AND the looming shutdown of Google+. It’s a tangled mess that I’m only just barely coping with, to be perfectly honest.
Blogs on Tape is going to be a particular challenge. The only sign of vandalism that occurred during this hack was that the Blogs on Tape website was made entirely inaccessible. I have all of the audio files themselves stored locally, but it never occurred to me to back up the website. All of those posts, as well as syncing them to iTunes, will need to be done over again. Whee.
I am sorry about this, everyone. Keep an eye on this space, and know that I’m doing what I can. If you need to get in touch I am available on Google+, on Mastadon, or by email at linkskywalker14@gmail.com. With any luck we should be back up and running soon.
-LS / Beloch Shrike / Nick Whelan
October 14th, 2018