I hope it's okay to ask this question. I went into work (a charity) today and was told that our website had completely disappeared. I was shocked to see our entire website (made up of several pages) had been replaced with one black screen, headed with a really nasty word, and other rubbish on it. So our entire website has gone and had been replaced with this frankly rather frightening screen. Please does anyone know how to track the source of this damage? Thank you for your help.

Ellen, November 2010

I forgot on bit:

It's very probable that ONLY the home page of your site have been vandalised.

The vandal had no use in changing or deleting the rest of the pages. His defacement do prevent the access to the rest.

Electro, May 2011

The damage was done by a prankster with a realy bad taste and sick sence of humour.

The source is sadly you, or your organisation, for not using adequate autentification and protection, and that lack allowed the vandal to log in and do it's dirty trick on you.

Now, all that you have left to do, is to restore your site from a backup. I hope that you DO HAVE a backup.

Next, you MUST set a few, idealy, only one, administrative user name with a good, strong password.

Your password MUST contain UPPERCASE, lowercase, number and, idealy, some special characters. Be at least 8 characters long.

It must NOT be easily guessable!
A nice source for that are those captchas you find in so many places. Note the 2 to 4 next ones you encounter and put them one after the other as a single password and add some special characters.

Ask several peoples, as many as you can, to try to guess your password. If no one can guess it, you are heading in the right direction. Now, add a few extra random characters to be sure.

Electro, May 2011