Hacked

I have been sick on and off since December and last week I had a really bad cold. I still don’t feel 100 percent. Last Wednesday there was a death in my family; I had to travel on Friday and attended the funeral on Sunday.

On Thursday I realized I had neither the physical or emotional energy to write an actual post. I planned to tell you this and link to a post titled Death that I did in August when another family member died.

I had written most of the post when my website stopped working. There was a big red screen that said the site was dangerous. If you clicked through that screen you were redirected to a PayPal log in. After a few minutes of trying to figure out what was wrong I called Blue Host, my network provider. I wasn’t very confident that they were be of any help because when I called a month ago about my Twitter problem, they were useless.

When I called Blue Host I somehow wound up being directed to Site Lock. I previously had a poor interaction with SiteLock and my website worked fine for many months after that. This time I got a nice guy, Antoine, who explained what was going on and didn’t try a hard sell. Of course, this time it was easier to convince me since my website didn’t work at all.

That was the good news. The bad news was that I have to pay $70 a month indefinitely to fix the hacking and prevent it from happening again. That is a lot of money. Antoine also said it could take up to 72 hours to fix my website and maybe longer to fix the twitter issue. Because of that, for the first time in over a year I didn’t post anything on Friday.