Hackers Deleted Our Blog
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Hey everyone,
I used to run a political blog, thecrimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com (here’s an archive of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20150704003913/https://crimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com/), that hosted controversial viewpoints and commentaries from a range of authors (including myself). Early last year, a group of self-described “hackers” were angered by a post on our blog and proceeded to harass us, threatening to “take our blog down”. We shrugged it off, thinking they were just trolls, but not a week later our blog and my wordpress account, crimesofcolonialism, were permanently removed via my account and email, which they also hacked. It was really quite terrifying. We tried filing a police report, but the authorities were unable to identify the hackers. Since blog deletion is permanent, we simply decided to make a new blog under a different name, to avoid the hackers. Luckily we saved most of our written content on Microsoft Word, but we’d love to have our old domain back. Is there any way we can have our blog restored, in light of the circumstances?
Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Correction: the blog I need help with is crimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com, our deleted blog, and not thecrimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com, our new blog.
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You are speaking in terms of “we” and “our”. In fact, every wordpress.com site has a sole owner and only one Admin per site is recommended.
Nothing related to site-administration is off-limits for Administrators, including deleting the entire site. This is why we recommend having only one administrator per blog. https://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/
Deleted blog URLs are not recycled, regardless of who registered and deleted them and no exceptions are made except for the one stated at http://en.support.wordpress.com/recycling-blog-names/.
re: hacked accounts and blogs
If anyone is posting anything to your blog or removing anything from it, or changing anything in it, or if your blog has been deleted and you did not delete it, then it’s most likely that you have provided them with the ability to do so, either deliberately by adding them as official users, or by allowing them access to your login information, or by posting content that makes it easy for them to guess what your log-in information is.
For you the question that needs to be answered is: Who, aside from me, has access to my login information?
Go to your email program immediately and change the password to a very difficult one because that’s how many hackers gain access to blogs.
Read > http://en.support.wordpress.com/security/
Change your blog password to a very difficult one > http://en.support.wordpress.com/passwords/#change-your-password
You can also reset your password via your Settings tab on the WordPress.com home page:
http://wordpress.com/#!/settings/Use a secure, encrypted connection to connect to your Dashboard. Under Users → Personal Settings, check the box that says “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages, and click Save Changes.
Use two step authentication http://en.support.wordpress.com/security/two-step-authentication/
Run a security scan on your computer. See here to run a security scan http://geekflare.com/online-scan-website-security-vulnerabilities/
Never leave your computer logged into your blog and walk away from it. Always log out properly.
P.S. Staff have records of who did what under which username and login information and when they did it. I flagged this thread with modlook for a Staff follow-up. Please subscribe to it so you are notified when they respond. To subscribe look in the sidebar of this thread, find the subscribe to topics link and click it. Note that there is a backlog and be patient while waiting.
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Thanks. I was the owner of the blog, but we had up to four different authors. The blog was permanently deleted last year. I changed my email password after it was compromised, but was never able to get back into my wordpress account. I assume that was deleted as well. These hackers were very skilled. We went to the authorities and they were unable to track them down. We gave up after that.
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Hi @thecrimesofcolonialism, sorry we can’t help in this case, especially given the account ownership issue. To protect the new site, please consider using 2FA with your email as well as your WordPress.com account:
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I was the owner of the blog, the one who started it, and friends of mine contributed as authors. I know my friends didn’t tamper with it. Hackers, who were harassing us, maliciously hacked into my account and email and deleted our blog, all because of our political views. I really wish wordpress had some kind of fail-safe for situations like this, as our blog had lots of readers. Thanks anyway though.
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Again, for reference, the blog that was hacked and deleted was http://crimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com, and this is an archive of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20150704003913/https://crimesofcolonialism.wordpress.com/
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You will have to copy paste the content from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine into new posts/pages. Staff cannot restore it for you.
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If you had contacted us right after it happened we would likely have better luck, but between needing to prove account ownership, the fact that the site was deleted, and that it’s been a long time now, there’s not much more we can do. Best wishes.
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