Recovering from parasite hosting intrusion

[JanFer]

I recently discovered that somebody had hacked into one of my sits, set up some new pages in an existing folder and was blog spamming the hell out of the pages they had created. All the pages were redirected to a search engine...

I have two questions:

1. How do I protect my site from this happening again, and;

2. Obviously I was going to simply delete the folder, but on second thought would there be any repercussions with my good standing in the search engines if I simply redirected the parasitic pags to my homepage, therefore taking advantage of the blog links? :P

[encyclo]

The blog links would be pretty worthless, so I wouldn't try to profit from them. Just send a 404 Not Found error for the extra pages created by the intrusion.

As for your first question, it is impossible to answer without knowing more detail. You should be aware that even if you clean up the intruder's pages, he may have left a back-door to your server to come back and do it again. You should seriously consider moving to a new server, and if you think the attacker got in via one of you scripts, either make sure it's updated if it is a commercial or open source script, or have a security audit done by a professional if it is a home-grown or custom script.

[JanFer]

Thanks for the advice.

I'll move to a new server.