Not sure what to make of this..

Possible hacking activity, but also perhaps just an odd occurrence.

The other day my website (www.cascadefire.com) suddenly began throwing php error's from the main page and the admin portal. I hadn't been editing the site, or really interacting with it in any way - and nor had anyone else to my knowledge. For this reason I wrote it off as a server issue and decided to wait for a few minutes. The main page came back up in that time, but the admin portal was still throwing a few errors that looked like the following:

Warning: main(includes/auto_loaders/config.core.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/cascade/public_html/Admin/includes/application_top.php on line 127

I checked the files mentioned, which were intact, but I restored their backed up counterparts anyways. No effect. I finally resolved the issue by restoring the 'config.core.php' file that resided in the Admin directory, not the one in the standard catalog directory. That file simply was no longer there, for some reason or another... :-/

I didn't find any suspicious activity in the logs, and no-one from another IP had accessed the ftp server. Nevertheless, it's a little disconcerting to have a critical file disappear....

Any thoughts?

Also, why didn't the PHP error point to the file in the Admin directory as the source of the problem?

Thanks!!

PS - According to my host nothing unusual was happened with my server that day.

cfe:

Warning: main(includes/auto_loaders/config.core.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/cascade/public_html/Admin/includes/application_top.php on line 127

Also, why didn't the PHP error point to the file in the Admin directory as the source of the problem?

Actually, it did.
You were running it "from" the "Admin" folder. As such, the includes/auto_loaders..... reference meant the one inside the Admin folder. If it had a preceding slash (/) then it would be an absolute path. But it didn't ... thus it was relative to the current working folder.
Hence, the second part of the error message which did mention the Admin folder gave you the second half of the information you needed to sort out what was happening.

Ah

For some reason I thought these PHP error's always used absolute paths, my bad.

:oops: