Wow, it’s March already! I was told when I was younger that time seems to go faster as you age. When I was little, I wanted time to speed up. You know you can get your ears pierced when you are 13, you can get a driver’s license at 16 and on and on. You keep waiting for those magical ages and it seems that they take forever to reach.
Then one day you are older, and time really does seem to fly by, just when you may want it to actually slow down.
Hacked Me?
Even with Covid this year, I found Christmas to be a busy time for me and then the week before Christmas I had the news that my website, this very one, was hacked! HACKED really, who would be interested in hacking a quilting website! Well apparently, someone did.
I got an email from the company that hosts my site saying they had taken me offline because of malicious files that had been embedded in some of my blog posts. At first, I thought it was a scam and ignored it until I went to do a blog post and realized that my website was gone.
Now came the fun part, trying to get everything fixed over Christmas! Luckily, I was able to hire a company that specializes in cleaning up this type of thing. To top it off I had also been blacklisted by Google so had to get that sorted out as well but thankfully this company was set up to help with that as well.
It’s sad when a company’s sole existence is to fix web sites that have been maliciously hacked into. but I am super thankful that they do exist because I would have been lost without their help.
It finally got all sorted out though and my website is back up and waiting for more blog posts.
I now have way more security on my little quilting website, than I ever thought I would need. It has been an interesting journey that’s for sure. I installed a plugin on my website called wordfence two weeks ago and to my utter surprise, it has stopped 6 people trying to hack into my site. It sends me notifications and it is fascinating information! It tells me what they are trying to use to get into the site, how many attempts before Wordfence locks them out and where in the world they are trying to access my site from.
Do these people have nothing better to do with their time! Imagine if they actually put that creativity into creating something good in this world instead of hacking into small websites and planting malicious files.
Well, maybe now I can get back to all things quilting!
Quilt Finishes
I did manage to finish one project over the Christmas holidays, and that was my Japanese Ladies panel I was working on. I got it all quilted, binding on however I waited until after the Christmas rush before sending the parcel and I’m glad I did. The quilt arrived in Virginia in just under a week. This is great news as I still haven’t received two Christmas cards that were sent me from the US way back in December. Maybe they will show up for next Christmas!
Happy Quilting!