Ting Corp & TechSavant

Ting Corp and TechSavant were both hacked while running Bluehost's SiteLock — a paid security product bought to prevent exactly that. That is the confusing part for an owner: the invoice says the sites are protected, and they were compromised anyway. A security subscription that does not stop an intrusion is worse than none, because it sells confidence instead of protection, and nobody looks any closer while the dashboard stays green.

• Recovered both sites from the compromise rather than patching over the visible symptoms.
• Secured them properly afterwards, so the result did not depend on the product that had already failed to prevent the breach.
• Reviewed what SiteLock was actually doing for the money, and advised cancelling it — a paid layer that did not stop this intrusion was not worth renewing.
• Left both sites on a footing the owner could verify for himself, instead of a dashboard asserting everything was fine.

Both sites recovered, secured, and a year clean since — with the SiteLock subscription cancelled rather than quietly renewed. The saving went further than the invoice: the owner stopped mistaking a paid dashboard for a secure site, which is the assumption that let the first compromise go unnoticed.

A security product you pay for is not the same thing as a site that is secure. Reading what it actually did — and saying cancel it — was worth more than the subscription.