.htaccess file was changed on the server, but not by me

Hi Ray, I had a strange issue this morning - I updated one of our sites using PowerCMS a couple of days ago using the Alpha version and upgraded to PHP7. I realised today that I hadn't updated the HTML Editor image upload to point to kcfinder on a separate DataAssist insert & update page. I updated the two pages, changed the config file in the kcfinder directory to point to a different directory, uploaded the three files to the server and also changed the main upload folder directly in the wa_settings table in the database.

However, after that I tried to access the site and got a Page Not Found error - not a PHP error, just Page Not Found. I got this on every page in the site.

After some investigation and raising a support ticket with our dedicated server suppliers, I noticed that the main .htaccess file on the server had been updated this morning - but I hadn't made any changes to it (and I'm the only person with FTP access). So it had basically wiped out all my settings and replaced them with the following:

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_flag engine Off
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_flag engine Off
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_php6.c>
php_flag engine Off
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_cgi.c>
Options -ExecCGI
</IfModule>

RemoveHandler .cgi .pl .py .pyc .pyo .phtml .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .php6 .pcgi .pcgi3 .pcgi4 .pcgi5 .pchi6 .inc
RemoveType .cgi .pl .py .pyc .pyo .phtml .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .php6 .pcgi .pcgi3 .pcgi4 .pcgi5 .pchi6 .inc
SetHandler None
SetHandler default-handler

# Remove both lines below if you want to render HTML files from the upload folder
AddType text/plain .html
AddType text/plain .htm

I didn't even have a copy of the .htaccess file saved locally, so I couldn't have accidentally uploaded it - and besides, the code above means nothing to me. I was able to restore the file from yesterday's backup, so the site is back up again.

I'm just interested to find out what might have happened - is there a chance that the changes I made in kcfinder might have rewritten the file on the server, or do you think this was an SQL injection attack?

This is from the file manager. You must have specified the root folder for file management. It automatically puts a htaccess file into the file upload root to help prevent hacking.

Delete that file and then make sure your file manager uses a sub-directory for uploads. You want the htaccess file in the file upload root, you just don't want that to be a folder where you have web pages like the site root.

Wow, I had no idea it did that - it's a relief because even our server company thought we'd been the subject of an attack! Will bear this in mind for future.