I was hacked.

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socialva

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On my other Alternate x10 Account, I below a 'well known hacker' that is claimed to be in this group 'Anonymous' Completely hacked my website and put some 'hacked by Anonymous' page. I had a Secure password, made myself, I just spammed a bunch of keys like $'s and lots of other hard to crack stuff, then encrypted it and put it in my Notepad. I'm wondering what to do with this?
 

essellar

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First, disabuse yourself of the notion that any password based on special characters, numbers or mixed case is more "secure" than any other. Unless the system does not allow special characters or forces letter case, the search space is the same (and is actually smaller if special characters are required. Length is what provides strength. (So for anyone cruising here and thinking of creating their own login system, or choosing one off the shelf, limiting password/passphrase length is wrong, wrong, wrong. So is forcing character choice. The only limit you should be placing on a password/passphrase is a minimum length.) And if by "encrypted" you mean you hashed it with something like MD5 (and anybody knows about that) you've really restricted the search space by forcing a single string length. Brute forcing just takes time.

It is far more likely, though, that you gave the username and password away yourself. I don't mean that you did it deliberately, but if you used a regular HTTP connection over open (unencrypted) wifi, like a public hotspot, the information was out there for anyone interested to read. Anyone within radio range running software like Firesheep can get your credentials if you use HTTP over an unencrypted network.

I wouldn't worry too much about Anonymous (the group) unless you're an "evil" corporation, a government agency or Scientology. It's very unlikely that a small, private site would interest them at all, and defacing hobby sites is not what they're about. It's more than an even chance that you were the victim of a "script kiddie" out for a bit of fun.

As for what you can do, well, if you can still log into your account portal (from a secure network this time), you can change all of your passwords for that account at one go. If you can't, but can still log into your forum account, you can request that your account be terminated immediately. If you can't do either, you should be able to use the "forgot password" function using your email address. Otherwise, you'll just need to let it go—requests need to come from your forum account in order to be verifiable (otherwise anybody could cancel anybody else's account at any time), and it's doubtful that your hacker will bother with the monthly logins required to keep the hosting account going.
 

Sharky

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Or alternatively if it was a 'system' like Wordpress, phpbb etc, and not fully updated, it's possible that someone exploited a security weakness. Happened to me once before. Turns out it was a really simple change to undo the damage but I still reinstalled it anyway.
 

Livewire

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Or alternatively if it was a 'system' like Wordpress, phpbb etc, and not fully updated, it's possible that someone exploited a security weakness. Happened to me once before. Turns out it was a really simple change to undo the damage but I still reinstalled it anyway.

Quoting for Truth; I've lost count of how many in October were from Wordpress/Joomla exploits in particular. In the case of WP ones, the ones I was seeing were already patched-out, but the software was never updated by the user. Make 100% sure to ALWAYS update to the latest version, and in the case of Wordpress, follow the guide linked below. There's also some security plugins for most CMS's to help increase security, but you'll want to ensure they stay updated - if a plugin isn't receiving updates, it's potentially hindering security, particularly if it becomes exploited as well. If you have a lot of plugins in use, consider deactivating the less-important ones - it's less chances for bad code to allow for a scripting exploit.

Hardening Wordpress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
 
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