Noah Stokes on Beating Spam Hackers

Recently, Noah Stokes discovered that his hosting account on Dreamhost had been hacked. It’s a good story of why you should always keep your software up-to-date as well as how to triage and treat this common type of hacking (they didn’t delete or destroy his site. The hack was only noticeable to the googlebot).

On June 23, my server on Dreamhost was hacked and 5 websites that I host were compromised with Pharmaceutical spam.  Below is an overly detailed account of how I discovered the intruision, what I did to find the offensive code on the server, and how I gained a little bit of respect for the hacker who paid attention to the details.  I think I’d like to hire this guy.

Noah used a solid debugging methods and a handy grep command to track down the affected files and disinfect his sites. Well done, sir.

Read the entire story (it’s a great read and very informative): My Server Was Hacked