One of the sites I maintain in my free time got hacked. When I looked at the site after a user reported it to me, I initially smiled and said, “at least these guys had a sense of humor about it and didn’t do much damage.” But then I thought about it a bit more, and then started to dwell on it.

That hack was a punch straight to my balls, and it hurt.

I should have kept up with upgrading the software. That simple act would have stopped this from happening. But I didn’t. I used the fact that this organization doesn’t pay me for my work as an excuse to not do my job. Now this site, which they use as a communication tool, is no longer available to them. This speaks volumes to my skill, and how much more I need to grow.

I have to spend time to fix this and make it right.

To be fair to myself, I set up that site in 2000 before I knew shit about web development. I had read a few PHP articles and fancied myself a web developer. I didn’t know much of anything, let alone security. When I moved all of my sites to a new webhost, I at least had the foresight to employ a security method that we use at my job to prevent hackers from coming across extremely sensitive data (like database usernames and passwords), so the damage was pretty self-contained.