It’s been brought to our attention that several fansite galleries were hacked recently.  Please read this coppermine gallery security alert and take steps to back up your databases immediately to protect yourself from this hack.

On our network recently vanessa-hudgens.org/photos was hacked, which will need to be restored from an earlier backup, as well as hilaryimages.com Please make sure you have a backup of your files and databases (especially databases right now) – no one knows what can happen in a hack and though we try to assist you with this, ultimately you are responsible for your own files.

This hack targets specifically the databases of Coppermine galleries.  The files are left untouched.  The albums in the galleries are deleted, and the theme is changed.  It appears like this after the hack: http://img130.imageshack.us/i/picture36u.png/  As you can see all albums have been deleted, the theme is changed and the gallery has been defaced.

Even if you cannot backup your site files because it is too big, at the least make a backup of your database to protect yourself from this recent hack.  It is a good idea to do this every week.  Please make a backup of your databases immediately right now. We are running an immediate backup of all databases on the accounts on our servers but you are responsible for keeping your own databases for your own sites.

How to backup databases in PHPMyAdmin.

* First log into your control panel (CPanel or Direct Admin) – Select PHPMyAdmin
* Follow these instructions: http://php.about.com/od/learnmysql/ss/mysql_backup_3.htm
* For DirectAdmin: Sql Management->PHPMyAdmin.  You will be prompted for username/password.  Use the username/password from the script in the /include/config.inc.php file
* For Plesk: Databases->DB WebAdmin