Update ownership of Joomla Account, and error once logged in.

[caporn]

We need to regain control and access to our Joomla Account.

Our website content is being held hostage by a third party web host, who will either not advise the correct Joomla login details or remedy the Joomla login 'error, cannot open logfile for writing'.


Background, FYI:
We paid for webdesign and hosting of our website, which has since been sold-without our knowledge to clickdot.com.au.
We do not grant clickdot.com.au any permission or access to any of our website content.
We have no paid services / agreement in place with clickdot.com.au. (Our website with them is not monitored or checked).

Preferred Option: To change the email associated with the Joomla and to reset the password.
If this is not possible, how else do we proceed?
- is it possible to copy the current content back across if a new Joomla account setup is required ?
- can we block this 3rd party from the existing/original content?

I believe that we have all of the proof of ownership / Identification that might be required.

We have now moved the Domain Registration, and content to our preferred host.

We have engaged a new website designer to update our website- who cannot login to Joomla to make any changes at all.

Thank you for your urgent assistance in helping us regain control over our website,

[itoctopus]

Cannot open logfile for writing typically happens when the Joomla website cannot write to the logs folder. In other words, Apache must have write access to the logs folder.

As for regaining access to your website, I believe I'm confused a bit. Is your whole Joomla website move to a totally new host? If yes, then you can reset the password using phpMyAdmin. There are many guides on how to do so (Joomla has an official documentation on how to do that, you can find it here: https://docs.joomla.org/How_do_you_reco ... assword%3F )

[sozzled]

Sorry to hear about your "clickdot" ransomware. Two possibilities here:

1) Report the incident to your webhosting provider; or
2) Report the incident to the police to investigate.

In the meantime, you might have to consider deleting your site and restoring it from a previous backup (which, I'm sure, you have).