Back in Black

So… don’t you hate when everything is going amazingly and then some supreme Butt Hole decides to randomly ruin it all for you because he doesn’t have a girlfriend, lives in Turkey, and needs something to do with his Thursday night? I do. That’s basically what happened.

I got hacked.

The server that hosts and runs DeaneOgden.com and The Conversation project was introduced to something called the “8lice” worm at approximately 3:14am EET last Friday by someone in Ankara named “MalaM” (which, ironically, means “night” in Bahasa Indonesia, for those of you who give a damn). As far as hacker names go, though, I thought that was pretty on the money, and that this guy must have done some research of his own on me. After my own exhaustive research, however, it turns out that his name is just a mere coincidence. These things are rarely ever aimed specifically towards a particular person, their site or their domain.

Damn. Another lost opportunity to feel famous for a minute.

What Does Getting Hacked Feel Like?

It’s a total invasion, to be honest. At least it was for me. When I woke up last Friday morning to the scrambled eggs that was DeaneOgden.com, my first though was, “Oh crap… what did I do?” Every morning while I drink ridiculous amounts of tea, I post The Riff to automatically update the next morning, and WordPress (which powers this site) always does a thorough job of handling the execution. So, when things go wrong it’s usually because I punched a button I shouldn’t have or added some code that WP doesn’t dig. Something on my end.

Not this time, though. I did everything right and I still got nailed. Once Amy and I had figured out that our server had been hacked into, the site had been down almost a total of 14 hours. This particular hacker hid his work very well. Well, sort of…

Who Hacked Me?

And how do I know he was a he? I wanted to know who I was dealing with, so we went on a bit of a fishing expedition. There aren’t many things that I get worked up about, but two things that get me all bunged up are privacy invasion and piracy. I like my privacy and I protect my art. There is little else in life we can control except our personal, private lives and what we create… and now, even those had been violated. So, I went on the defensive.

After we isolated where the attack had come from—by some illuminating information being generated by a script that MalaM uploaded to my server called “charliesheensshorts” (I know… I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried)—we were able to isolate his IP address and learn which vulnerability he exploited to get inside the server. After that, it got interesting.

Friends in Low Places

The only thing I know about hackers is that I hated the movie. Until last week, I didn’t know anything about this stuff, and it all seemed so incredibly advanced and over my head (not to mention, illegal) that I’ve never been interested in learning anything about it. But like most of what we think about our culture, a lot of it is made up. It’s all out of a Hollywood movie. It turns out that hacking into someone’s website, even their life, is not difficult at all. And there is an entire community out there of people who will teach you this stuff. For a fee, of course.

Here’s a list of things I now either know how to do, or at the very least, know the person who can:

• Change DMV records
• Alter university grades at most major institutions
• Change name information in the IRS database (it auto-correct’s itself within minutes, but you can change it temporarily)
• View your personal debt information from two of the three major credit bureaus
• Find out where you bank within about two minutes, and how much you have in your bank account within three minutes
• Add or delete children in your public record (people do this all the time for tax purposes, apparently)
• Change your “amount owed” data on most state government unclaimed property databases (I’m told there it is also quite simple to swap information between accounts, making it possible to steal someone else’s junk)
• … and a few more handy little maneuvers

How did I learn about all of this crap? From my new friends in the hacker community. Through this experience, I’ve discovered that there are as many “good hackers” as there are “bad hackers.” Kind of like Glenda and Elphaba from The Wizard of Oz. Some of these people like to help out people like me who have been the victim of an attack on their stuff. And, get this: There are even good hackers who really get into helping people of an artistic nature, because, as one hacker group’s manifesto states, “we believe that art is sacred and should be shared, but only at the will of the artist.” Fuckin’ weird. Other “good hackers” just like to try and scare people into thinking about how much of their digital freedom they are giving away to places like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. The infamous worldwide hacker group “Anonymous” is a perfect example of this strategy.

As we started to get to know a few of these people who were helping us sort the spaghetti of the hacked website, I found a new respect for a group of people whom I always thought were just a pack of criminals that hadn’t been caught yet. Cyber terror, like most things in society, has two faces: The one that all but destroyed my website last week, and the one that wants to help people learn how to avoid victimization by the former. It’s a pretty cool group of people. I now have hacker pals in Sydney, Dubai, Latakia (Syria), and an especially great guy from Florida, whom I’ve become fast friends with and will be visiting—in the flesh—before 2013.

So What Has Changed?

A lot. I now have a pretty bulletproof set-up where my website is concerned. We’ve got everything back, and we’re about 98% back to business as usual around here at the Musicave.

I’ve already decided that in a future post I’m going to share all the ways that Creatives should consider securing their work online. It’s an important step for all of us, I believe. There’s a lot that you need to do to truly be safe from the people out there who get amused by replacing your Soundcloud files with Mantovani’s Greatest Hits. It’s quite a list, and might take you a bit of doing if you are not all that tech savvy. But if you aren’t… I now know the people who can help.

What’s Still Broken?

A couple things. Our first priority has been getting the site back up and running. Now that we’ve accomplished that, the work to clean things up really starts.

1. PostsWe lost our entire database and had to reconnect from a backup that was about two weeks old. That’s because our lovely guest also found a way to corrupt the most recent backup of the site while he was monkeying around behind the scenes. As a result, some of the posts are still displaying weirdly. Amy is moving through each post in time and fixing them all by hand, which blows severe goats, as you might imagine. You might see some doubled-up images, missing images, weird shortcode markup that shouldn’t be where it is, and a plethora of other backside stuff that you weren’t meant to see. We’ll have it all cleaned and spotless in time.
2. The “Essentials Skills” SeriesSpeaking of images, two very popular posts in my Essential Skills of a Modern Day Film Composer series lost all of their images, which is a real friggin’ bummer since those images helped a lot with the information presented. What Directors Want from Their Composers: The Hollywood Directors and What Directors Want from Their Composers: The Indie Directors both lost all of their helpful “pie-chart” images because those were tied to a dynamic script that was also corrupted by our pal MalaM. (Ain’t he great?!) I have backups of the images offline, so once we get everything else back to normal, we’ll replace those images and the two posts will be complete again.

And Now, It’s Time for a Breakdown…

After taking an hour out of every day last week to approve the changes that Amy was forced to make due to our little “problem”, I’m sick and tired of web shit! I’m anxious to get back to our daily stuff here on the site and excited to bring you guys some cool things that I’ve had planed for [DeaneOgden.com]. No more crap! Let’s just focus on the future and get moving on with some great new things!

And with that, I’ll leave you with a bit of Angus to brighten your day with. Don’t say I never gave ya nuthin’.

Thanks for sticking in there with me. And a HUGE thanks to everyone who emailed with “Everything okay?” well-wishes and offers of help. You guys all rule the world.

- DO

If you can’t see the video below, click here.