Some really nice person recently hacked into my server and adjusted several of the sites there (on a shared, hosted environment). You expect this kind of thing with the typical “Ha, Ha” splash page instead of your painfully developed landing page. The interesting aspect was the hacker took the original index file and substituted their splash page with the message “Contact me to get your index page back”.

So, assuming you had developed your site using PHP. You would have likely placed most of your logic in an index file and use .htaccess to allow for nice, SEO URLs. Now, you get a hacker come in and steal your index file. The index file probably covers 90% of the web site functionality. If you don’t have a backup somewhere what do you do?

• You can’t really contact the hacker (Assume the hacker splash page has a bogus email account).

• Even if you did manage to contact them do you think they would do (four letter word coming) WORK and save off your precious index file vs. just replace it with their slime? They are probably praying for someone to respond to their handiwork, promise them, “Yes, I will give you index file back as soon as I get a PayPal payment of (exorbitant amount goes here)”. Knowing full well there is no index file being held for ransom.

Seems like it would be interesting to provide a “site watcher” type of application that just watches all of the files on your site and notifies you of any change in real-time. Maybe it even allows you to put the old file back as part of the message sent to you. (Please forward me a nice donation if you take this idea)