Phishing Victim…..Me?

I enjoy writing my blog. I really enjoy getting comments. That means that someone has read my Blog, and thought enough about it to take the time and write a comment. I put an effort into thinking about topics to write on and for the most part it appeared that the people that wrote comments did also. That was until recently.

In the last few months I started to get a significant number of comments. At first I thought this was pretty neat. We all like a little recognition and this increase in comments seemed to indicate that I might be getting some.

Not…

Upon closer inspection of this newfound number of comments I noticed that they all seemed to be based from “Russian” servers. This is only an assumption, but it is based on the URL nomenclature of the site that generating the comment. Russian? Really? Could I really be generating a following in Russia?

Still something about this seemed “Phishy”. So I decided that I would Google one of the more reasonable sounding sights to see if they truly existed. It generated another Blog site. I then decided to go to one of this more reputable sounding site. I went, I saw, and I read. No big deal.

That’s when it started. The next day I got notification from my site hosting service that they had complied with my wish to have my domain changed. My domain changed? Who requested that?

I then went to my site to see what this all meant. What is meant was my site was no longer where I had bookmarked it. My site had been hijacked.

I then called (not emailed, not IM’ed, called) my hosting provider and asked what was going on. They said that they had complied with my email request to relocate my site to another domain/server. This was obviously news to me.

After verifying (via security questions and the like) that I was in fact who I said I was, and that the site in question was indeed mine, we started down the road to reclaiming my site. After the appropriate programming magic was accomplished, we started back-tracking what had happened.

It appears that by even going to the supposedly acceptable site of one of my commenter’s I had somehow enabled them to get into my hosting account through the information I had left (like they leave at my site) at their site. They then hacked my account and hijacked my site.

This was again, and interesting and somewhat unsettling experience. But the greater question to me is: Why would someone want my site? There is not a significant amount of traffic there (from internet standards), nor are there any secrets. I guess I will have to be vigilant and watch for any issues that may arrive at a later date. In the mean time, I would ask and suggest that all who receive any of these strange / anomalous emails or comments to beware.