Summary: <br> On July 20th of this year my website was hacked and malware was installed on my backend servers. My website was promptly shutdown and the next 8 weeks spawned into more work outside of my natural strength zone than I could have ever imagined.<br> NOTE: The security team who oversaw the cleanup process of my website indicated that customer information was NOT accessed in the hack. If by chance that is not correct, which is highly unlikely, the only personal information that would be accessible would include email addresses. I do not store any financial information on my site, so any transactions you may have completed were done so securely. <a href="https://www.jeffsanders.com/contact-jeff-sanders/" target="_blank">Contact me</a> with any questions. Thanks!<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.jeffsanders.com/book-giveaway-begins-today/">← Previous Episode</a><br> <a href="https://www.jeffsanders.com/the-balance-between-education-and-action-podcast-118/">Next Episode →</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.jeffsanders.com/four-lessons-learned-spending-8-weeks-outside-my-strength-zone/"></a>Photo Credit: <a style="color: #808080;" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/41611970@N00/284804050/" target='“_blank"midiman/a'>Compfight</a> <a style="color: #808080;" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target='“_blank"cc/a/span/center/p<br'></a> pIn the seven years that I have been blogging and working with websites I have never been hacked, until now. I ended up paying a few companies hundreds of dollars to clean up the mess and return everything to normal – though the latter never actually happened./p<br> pOver the course of the last two months I have also spent hundreds of hours restoring services, upgrading servers, writing code, troubleshooting acronyms that I don't understand, and trying desperately to learn whatever I had to in order to regain what I lost./p<br> pThough getting hacked may sound rough, it was merely the tip of the iceberg — the instigator of the real work yet to come./p<br> h2span id="more-124140"/spanI Am NOT A Coder/h2<br> pKnowing who you are is really a testament to self-awareness, a keen understanding of your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, preferences and the lack thereof./p<br> pIf I had to sum up the last 8 weeks in one sentence it would be this: emI am NOT a coder/em./p<br> pcenterimg alt="Gray Bar" src="https://www.jeffsanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GrayBar.jpg" width="580px" //centerbr /<br> center/p<br> h3iFor years I have thought of myself as a well-rounded guybr /<br> who could do anything well. Turns out, that’s just not true./i/h3<br> p/p<br> p align="right" style="margin-right:100px;"– strongJEFF SANDERS/strong/p<br> p/centerbr /<br> centerimg alt="Gray Bar" src="https://www.jeffsanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GrayBar.jpg" width="580px" //center/p<br> pI don't truly understand websites, server configurations, or technical jargon like HTML, PHP, or CDN. I know just enough to be dangerous and I frequently push the boundaries of what I don't know, which inevitably yields the end result you might expect: lots of errors, headaches, and angry fist pumps./p<br> pFor years I have thought of myself as a well-rounded guy who could do anything well. Turns out, that's just not true. More than that, it's an awful belief system that has held me back from doing my best work for years./p<br> h24 Lessons I Learned While Buried in Ones and Zeros/h2<br> pThough you may not spend any of your time wading through website code, you likely know exactly how it feels to take on projects that far exceed your current skill set./p<br> pSince hindsight is so clear, I want to take a minute and reflect on a few lessons I learned from this mostly preventable experience./p<br> h31.
