Appalachian Renegade underwent a targeted attack yesterday. Although three of my sites were unavailable, AR was the only one where the DNS IP addresses were changed and the new owner was listed as AnneLoudan1@gmail.com. The other sites were just attacked without a redirect.
How did this happen? Someone logged into our main account at the ISP which gave them control over basically everything. I asked the tech support employee if it was a security certificate issue and he said that it definitely was not.
I knew it was not a computer issue as I was not able to log into my AR account. So they went in and changed admin passwords for AR after gaining complete access through CPanel. Once the passwords were changed, it took less than five minutes to redirect the DNS address for AR. So this was not a server issue: someone hacked into my ISP’s server and then reset the admin password for AR. Once in, the DNS change which normally takes 24 hours was done instantly.
From our ISP:
We understand that your websites for AppalachianRenegade.com, caddgraphics.com, and NCRenegade.com are currently unavailable. Given the unrecognized login notification and the changes you are reporting, we are treating this matter as a security concern and have escalated it to our Engineering Team for investigation.
Our engineers will review the account activity, DNS configurations, and any changes made to the affected domains to determine what occurred and what steps are needed to restore your websites.
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For those who want to say some variation of “you should have done this…”, please do not. We have to understand that there is no security for the Internet at this time.
Times are not spicy or even sporky: we are at war. If you want to debate why, go no further than the warnings across Western nations and Japan to prepare for an event to have food and water for 3 days up to several months.
Maybe the military bases will start letting in people since they will have power, water and food for 90 days. If you believe that, you may also believe Israel is not in control.
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