Have you ever owned a website or often visit a website that was hacked by someone? And if you were apart of a website that was hacked, did any of your info get stolen to your knowledge?
I owned several forums in the past in one of those free-hosting communities.
My username was stolen when i logged in a cybercafe, i didnt have anything important back there but i'm sure that it made a huge impact in me after that.
Back in my younger years, I owned a forum based around a virtual game, it got hacked by sql injection. Thankfully they never had cPanel access so my database was secure, the account affected wasn't master admin either, so they couldn't view the user tab in admincp, but they did mess up my theme and release it.
I also visited other forums which had the same issue, turns out it was the forum software and several plugins had a vulnerability issue, which was patched up but the so called hackers turn to methods such as ddos.
I have methods to keep the site from getting hacked. I use Cloudflare, I have DDoS protection and also use mod security WAF and config server firewall.
I've never had my site hacked but I will say I have been DDoS before I got protection. I used to run a modding site and it got DDoS a lot. I had a hard time keeping it online as it was always being attacked. Anyways I started using protection ever since then and haven't had any problems since. Someone could take the site down if they wanted but it would take a lot more than your average joe.
Early into my website running, I was hacked, I have to admit it was so stressful, time consuming and utterly devastating as even though I created backups the .zips were corrupted. Needless to say I learnt my lesson.
I remember once I was a victim of hacking. My website was erased, and the hacker leaked all of my details on a public forum. I reported him to the local authorities, and the post got removed, and I've not seen him since. This just shows how important a backup is!
I ended up shutting down one of my old projects, Gamers Euphoria, after it fell victim to being hacked.
As far as I could tell at the time, it was purely a defacement - in hindsight most likely caused by a SQL/XML injection through an Arcade game upload script - I didn't look into it too much further at the time, and despite being able to reverse the defacement it started to happen on an almost daily basis. The community was struggling for activity at the time, and honestly I didn't have the knowledge, time, or will to spend my time trying to investigate and prevent it from occurring.
I was an administrator with some friends from Se7enSins once. During my time as an administrator, I got told by another administrator that a user had hacked the website and had a copy of the database. We were using XenForo and this was back in 1.x days. Idk if it was true. But because I was told that by another administrator, it didn't help that I was being blamed by another user for something else. I checked the log of action that had been taken against a thread (who locked it) and it turns out it was the site owner who locked it.
Most of the forums I have ran in the past, I was never directly hacked. There might have been 1 or 2 back in the earlier days, that I could have been using insecure versions of softwares. Though I am not entirely sure if my lack of knowledge at that time was the issue, or if the software was to blame.
All I know, is that after a few attempts from people to try to ruin a couple forums I owned or ran, I finally got the hint to run better security on my end, to keep the forum admin side safe.