I’ve got the site back up and running, well it was up again yesterday, but only in a place holder sort of way.
I suppose now is a good time to look at the installation that I had and do a bit of a clean up, the installation was over 3 or 4 years old and over that time, I’ve installed a lot of stuff and removed it as well so it was starting to get a bit messy.
The exploit used should not have worked as I am always running the latest release of WP and I do run a checked on the site, it was this checker that alerted me to the problem, plus the fact that half of the database tables had been deleted. They were deleted a little while after.
Since then I’ve been going through the backups to see if I can retrieve my old posts for the site, not to worried about the Google News posts as these are just to keep the site fresh with news so search engines keep checking the site.
To restore the site I am getting new copies of all of the plugins I use and of course a clean copy of WordPress, this time I am also hardening the site as well. (I thought it was ok before, oh well.)
The Gallery was untouched along with the several other sites I have, the ones I don’t touch much I have removed for now. I’ve redone the subscriptions so hopefully everyone will now get this update as well.
Happy Christmas All.