Yep, looks like you got some squatters

Scroll down a bit and a reader will see that Michael linked up one of my Missile Test articles here at Daily Exhaust. I love getting shout outs like that. Yesterday he sent me an IM asking me to check out the stats on my site, as he was curious what sort of juice a DE link up is worth these days. So last night after work I logged on to Dreamhost’s basic stats page, and saw this:
stats_bl.jpg
Last week, well before Michael posted his link, hell, before I even wrote the article, Missile Test saw an over 30,000% jump in traffic. Trust me, this had nothing to do with me. I scrolled down further into my stats looking for anything else out of order, and there it was, page requests for a folder I know I did not put on my site. I looked on my server, and there was a whole other website squatting on my domain, selling vpn access to god knows who out of who knows where. I’d been hacked.
Know that feeling you get when you see a roach scuttle across your kitchen counter when you thought things had been clean? That’s what it feels like when you get hacked. Unclean. I was even worried about how the search engines would feel about me now that the vast majority of my traffic was criminal. Was I now an unsafe site? Hopefully I caught the disease in time. As you can see from the bottom of the screenshot above, things went back to normal quickly after I deleted the offending files from my server. But still…my skin is crawling a little bit.

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