I realize the site performance the last few days hasn’t been very good. I’ve been working very hard looking into what’s going on. I’ve found several very bad things which I’ve been dealing with.
First off, my dedicated server has been hacked. I’ve been working for days to get rid of malicious files and hidden spam links (not on Ute Hub though).
In the last few days my SQL queries are exceeding 100% of the CPU power of the server. That’s the source of the slowdown. Not sure if that’s part of the hack or not, perhaps a bot hitting the server trying to hack it again, or a new development from a script update or change. I’ve spent hours and hours looking at logs and trying to figure out where the issue is coming from.
Lastly, I found some 200,000+ spam emails in the server’s outgoing queue. Somehow the hackers/bots managed to actually create fake email accounts and start sending out spam. I’ve cleared out all the fake accounts and deleted the 200K outgoing mails, but as far as I can tell some 100K were sent out before I caught it. I put limits on the number of email accounts and number of emails that can be sent out, so that if this happens again, they’ll not be able to send out thousands of spam emails.
Right now I feel like I’m fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun. I’m very frustrated. Things are running at the moment. I’ve scanned the server several times a day for the last couple of days and no hacked code has been found. Unfortunately the CPU usage is still pretty maxed. I’m hoping that the issue will go away when the bots move on to their next target, as has happened in the past.
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