Sunday, May 20, 2012

Horrible Hidious Heinous Hackers from Hell

At first I was furious. I took it as a personal assault. What sick, twisted freak would do this to an artist? When I clicked to my website sharoncrute.com, a window popped up stating "Reported Attack Page!". What the....?
 
 
After contacting Yahoo who has hosted my website since 2000, they proceeded to pass the buck to Google. When I finally reached a genuine human within the vastness, I was directed to a website that would provide step by step instructions to help. Uh-uh.

If you have a website and you've never authenticated it with Google, I strongly advise you do it now. Google does have useful webmaster tools but your site must be authenticated. How was I to know that? And...I can't accomplish that step because my site is re-flagged and I've become a whirling dervish.


So, I've been hacked. I pulled my entire site down, all 857 files and 27 folders representing six or so years of work for my designer Julie K and myself. I don't have time nor do I care to allot resources to rebuild from scratch in Dreamweaver. I've signed on with this site building service for artists: Fine Art Studio Online (FASO). I won't have the flexibility and control to appease this perfectionist, but the templates are clean, simple and showcase the art.

Please hang in there with me. I'll be back up and running ASAP.

4 comments:

Judy said...

Keep the faith....this too shall pass. Of course, after much frustraton, time, money, etc. I'm patient and will wait as I "stick" by my favorite artist! ♥

Sharon Crute said...

Aw Judy...what a lady you are.
I finally have a very meager page up and Google has taken down the red-flag. Not only was my site hacked, my e-mail account was also nailed. All those hundreds of e-mails in my address book...gone! Surprisingly, it feels quite liberating.

Jo Castillo said...

Ah, so sad to lose all your hard work. Maybe you will have more time giving the work over to the templates. I have been tempted.

I love your work and follow along even when I don't comment. Best of luck and we will love whatever you create!

Sharon Crute said...

Thank you Jo.
It is liberating to get away from all that HTML and copying code and uploading to the ftp. The new service doesn't give me as much freedom of design, but I wanted to simplify and I am! Right now I'm just trying to get used to the new service. A little everyday.