Secret Weapon Labs

I Step Away For 2 Days…

and look what happens.

Let me recap, as some of you may have noticed, when I viewed the site last night it was just a placeholder.  Kind of a link farm, affiliated ads page, and random search engine all wrapped into one.  My site was offline, viewers were met with a SecretWeaponLabs is coming soon and all I could think was: “I was hacked”
First the emotional response, then the angrier and vindictive one came from within: “Someone, will have hell to pay”  I was pissed and I wanted to figure out what the hell had happened.  The page that was now coming up had no brand or company name, so that was a worry.  I then confirmed that I had paid all of my hosting bills and had a faint recollection that my domain was fully paid until June.  I checked my spam folder to see if any errant warning messages about the domain or hosting had slipped by and nothing came up. WTF?

Had some spammer or ID thief managed to steal my password and reroute the page to their servers.  A WHOIS lookup proved that I still owned the site which was a relief.  But I still couldn’t figure out who the hell was serving it.  So I promptly did a TraceRoute and found some expireddomains.net (or something like it) name and promptly visited the site, only to be met with a blank screen.  It felt like a dead end but the obvious new conclusion was that I had failed to renew the name.  The next question was, who the hell did I use to register the name when I paid for it 8 years ago?  Ummmmm….

Lets use Spotlight, and see if my trusty Apple laptop can survey its memory better than my own.  Nothing came up.  Which perplexed me, but it was 4am and I couldn’t see straight and I was pissed.  Thus, I wasn’t necessarily thinking straight.

Finally I notice a mention in the traceroute of buydomains.com and realize I had used them prior.  BuyDomains now had hell to pay.  I wanted to open up a chat with every damn support agent and start typing everything in caps: HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?  WHY DIDN’T YOU GUYS TELL ME THAT THE DOMAIN WAS GOING TO BE EXPIRING?

I login to my account and realize the domain had expired but was perplexed as to why I never was reminded or warned, only to see my old unused and deleted Hotmail address still associated with the billing & admin contact with the site.  Somehow, I knew this was Microsoft’s fault (it clearly wasn’t, but it felt orders of magnitude better to blame someone other than myself).  So I updated the site DNS info, set reminders in Google Calendar, iCal, the Palm Pilot, and everywhere else and am now fully back in the proverbial saddle.

The lessons:

• Make sure everything is up to snuff on your domain info
• When you point a finger, three fingers point back
• And somehow, someway, it may be Micrsoft’s fault (kidding)