Have you ever heard the old Spanish proverb, “En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo” (The Blacksmith’s Home has Wooden Knives) Or perhaps, more common-The Cobbler’s Kid’s Have No Shoes. Other culture’s have equal sayings- In Chinese “the lady who sells fans fans herself with her hands”, in Arabic, “at the potter’s house water is served in a broken jug”. Regardless, it means that in business, very often we take better care of our customers than ourselves.
My forte is marketing strategy and execution. I am an expert on PPC, SEO, Social Media and driving the right audience to a business. Every single marketing initiative has two components- a pitcher and a catcher. Social Media, SEO, PPC, etc all drive someone to perform an action. That action is usually done on a website. Therefor the website better be good at converting people. Since I am a full-service agency and know that the conversion is where the lead happens, I know just how very important it is to have a great website. When built right it helps convert more customers and leads, it helps SEO and even affects PPC. (How it does that is a whole different set of blogs. )The point is that I am so busy taking care of clients websites and business, that I often don’t pay the same level of attention to my own that I would theirs. Since most of my business is through word of mouth and referrals and my website is “good enough” I never really pay too much attention to it.
So, on Friday night, when I get a text from my favorite monitor tool, Uptime, that my site was down. I didn’t think much of it. I would check it out in the morning. So after a nice dinner with Melissa and prepping dinner, I thought I will just see what is going on in the morning.
An Alarming Email To Wake Up To
Then I woke up to alarming message that I had never seen before from Google Search Console. “Social engineering content detected on https://paperboatmedia.com/clone”
So I check my website. My website with hundreds of blogs I have written over the years, an incredible imagery I designed and other things… and my website – ALL GONE!!! Instead, there was a website with an input box asking for someone’s email address. I freak out and send a message to my developer about the issue only for it to be blocked. I can’t send out emails from my G-Suite Account. Every time I tried to send something, it states, “this message has been blocked due to people reporting Phishing Activity from the listed URL.”
I call G-Suite- excellent customer service by the way, and we go through my SPF records, DKIM, DMARC, etc and everything is fine. However they can see that the bounce back replies to the hacker assuming my email address was in the tens of thousands. Luckily, I wasn’t blacklisted, and the guy on the phone said to fix the website first, then address the email issue.
So, I call my hosting company and they say- everything is gone. Usually when you are hacked there is a redirect or files or changed, or added. In this case, everything is completely erased. I am savvy enough to believe in the importance of frequent backups (anyone who ever lost an important Microsoft Word Document they accidentally didn’t save will probably never again backing something up). However, my hosting company said because my site was over 10 gigs it would take over 96 hours to get me the backup. (Or pay 600 dollars for them to restore it..um, no thanks)
Of course, I have three outstanding proposals and someone reviewing my resume for a consulting opportunity. Pretty embarrassing to say that I was hacked when people trust me to make their websites and prevent such problem’s from happening.
So, I restored my website, updated some of the plug-ins, changed some of the security features and decided I am going to do a completely new design on my homepage anyway. If I am going to update it, might as well make it sizzle. I asked Google to reindex my fixed site in the interim and asked for a security review from Search Console to fix my email issue.
Until Next Time, Robert Urban –
CEO and best-selling author, Marine veteran. Offers expert-level strategy and execution through relationship driven marketing, content and sales while leading and managing people from all different backgrounds. Paperboat is headquartered in Deland, Florida.