The Night My Entire Site Network Died
Hard Lesson 05 — Coming Soon
One security vulnerability. One night. Hundreds of hours of work — gone. I watched my entire Drupal site network get wiped out by what the security community later named Drupalgeddon. No warning. No recovery window. Just gone.
What Is Drupalgeddon?
In October 2014, the Drupal security team announced a critical SQL injection vulnerability — officially SA-CORE-2014-005 — buried deep in Drupal 7's core. SQL injection means an attacker can feed malicious code through a normal input field and get your database to execute it. Full control. Everything exposed.
What made this one catastrophic wasn't just the vulnerability. It was the speed. Automated attack scripts were scanning and hitting every unpatched Drupal installation on the internet within hours of the announcement. The Drupal security team issued a rare public advisory that said something most software companies would never admit in writing: if your site wasn't patched within seven hours of the announcement, assume it's compromised. Not "might be." Assume it.
Millions of sites were affected. The security community called it Drupalgeddon. I didn't know that term at the time. I just knew my sites were gone.
What Happened
I had built a network of sites on Drupal — the CMS that half the internet was using at the time. It was powerful, flexible, and popular. It was also a massive, well-documented attack surface sitting on top of a SQL database that every script kiddie on earth knew how to exploit.
When Drupalgeddon hit, it wasn't a matter of "if." Sites that weren't patched within hours were compromised. Mine were compromised.
What It Cost
Years of content. Hundreds of hours of writing, building, configuring, optimizing. Traffic I'd spent years earning. Rankings I'd built carefully from scratch. The kind of work that compounds over time — and evaporates instantly when the foundation gives out.
This, combined with Amazon going exclusive on the Pro 2300, was enough to step back from actively running the vacuum sealer operation at the time. The domains stayed in inventory. Now I'm rebuilding the whole network properly — static sites, no single points of failure, and with AI doing the heavy lifting, it's actually a great time to hold a lot of domain inventory.
What I Changed
Everything. I no longer build Drupal sites. I'm deeply skeptical of any CMS that sits on top of a SQL database with a plugin ecosystem that requires constant patching. The attack surface is too large and the maintenance burden is too high.
When I absolutely have to build a WordPress site, I back it up obsessively and I'm deliberate about hosting choice. But my preference now is static — no database, no server-side code, nothing to exploit.
The Better Way
Static sites can't be hacked the way CMS sites can. There's no SQL injection because there's no SQL. There's no plugin vulnerability because there are no plugins executing on a server. The file is just a file.
That's why this site is built on Astro, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, deployed from GitHub. It's fast, it's cheap, it's safe, and I can rebuild it in an afternoon if I need to. That's the goal.
The Full Story Is Coming
When I write it out in full — the timeline, the actual damage, the recovery attempts, the decision to walk away from an entire niche rather than rebuild on the same broken foundation — it'll be here. Subscribe to nothing, check back whenever. It'll be worth reading.