Krabi 
So remember my last post and how I was SO HAPPY to finally have my site up and running again after being hacked? Well, less than three weeks later it happened AGAIN. I couldn’t believe it. How do you have the same site for over four years with no issues and then get hacked twice within a month? Utter lunacy. I didn’t want to ask my friend for help again, he was awesome for helping me for free last time and I didn’t feel right asking for help again. My art portfolio site is not his job. Plus, maybe I was in need of something a little more intense to keep this from happening again. After doing some online research I found a security company that could not only remove the malware from my site, but do daily monitoring to keep it from getting hacked again.
Colgong They had the malware removed within a day of my signing up, and sent me back a clean zipped version of all of my files. I’m not sure what I messed up on the re-install, but suddenly all of my content was gone. I could log in, I could view all of my posts in the admin screen, but when I tried to view the site as a regular viewer, every single page sent back a “404 Page Not Found” error. I chalked it up to me having no idea what the hell I was doing, did a bunch MORE research on pretty much every WordPress message board I could find, and came to the conclusion that everything I tried was not working and I needed help.
I emailed the security company again begging for help with the reinstall.
Apparently it didn’t even need to be reinstalled, I was just missing some important file and after they uploaded it all of my content came back. Except for my images. Those were gone. And for some weird reason, they are not in my clean backup files.
You would think this would be pretty catastrophic for an art blog, but not really. Pretty much every image on the site already lives on my computer (AND my backup drive) so nothing was REALLY lost. Yes, I had to re-upload all of my images, but I decided to use it as a nice opportunity to give megandowntherabbithole a little facelift. It’s been a while since I gave the site a fresh look, and I found a really awesome new WordPress theme with some great gallery features that I’m really excited about. While I can’t say I’m glad I was hacked and my site was down for almost a month (although to be fair, a lot of that was time everything was just sitting there while I was waiting to get paid so I could sign up for the security monitoring and malware removal) it worked out for the best. I deleted some old content that didn’t really fit the site anyone, cleaned things up, streamlined other things, and everything seems to run much faster now. I hope you like the improvements.
You may find a post here and there that are still missing images, because still working on getting everything 100% back on track. In the meantime, if you run into anything here that looks a little janky let me know, and I’ll do my best to get it fixed. And enjoy my pretty new image I created a while ago but never posted.
It’s good to be back!