Ok, I shall put it here and lock this puppy up... (email me if you want to get intouch)
Basically my laptop hard drive crashed with all the backups on. I had bought a new laptop but since the website had been going for over 2 years without a single hitch, my initial thoughts were not "shit lets back this up.." - hindsight!
Anyway there was another "work in progress" hefeiexpat website I had on the go in the background, some of you may have seen it (it was in progress for a loong time!)
I was using a script on that sight that was exploited... "noah's classified ads" plugin for joomla - for anyone thats interested. This script was exploited buy some guys who then uploaded their web scripts that A. acted as one of their many mail servers/spammers (the server started spitting out 100k of emails) B. acted as some sort of phishing website. So midphase (my previous hosting provider) took action and shut down all my access....
Now usually midphase automatically do regular backups (one of the main reasons I pay a webhosting company), but since I couldn't get in and do it myself (notifying me so I could delete the offending content, or simply doing it themselves was apparently not the option?!?) there was simply nothing I could do and had to rely on their daily/weekly/monthly backups.... (obviously having a local backup would of helped) I had emailed them numerous times.... end of the day they came back to me and said all their backups were blank.... what can you do?!
Hefei Expat - China
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