Lessons learned: I don’t log on to my wife’s blog enough to see it needs updates. So I just enabled automatic updates for everything on it to mitigate that in the future. The downside of that is, I won’t see if an update will fail until later but I can always restore things like I did in this case.
Positives: My backups work. It was simple and easy to do a restoration. I logged into PHPMyAdmin dropped the table for her blog and then imported my backup and all was well again. After completing the updates it was ready to go.
For us her blog is pretty important. It acts as our family journal that she writes in every Sunday and reflects on our family and children.
I’m now also looking into a plug-in that will remind me to update her site.
Article with more information on this exploit and hack.