I happened to notice today that one of my Web sites was hacked.
They somehow replaced my index.php with index.html with only the text
"DigitalMind" in it.
Actually, they just inserted index.html, and since my server processes
index.html before index.php, the site displays that.

So, how did they do this? More importantly, how do I prevent it from
happening again?
I guess I can contact my Web host and ask them to set it to only use
index.php as the root page, but can they possibly replace MY index.php
with THEIR index.php in the future?

Thanks for any information!
Oh, if it helps, I'm using RedHat ES 2.1 with Apache 1.3.33 (I believe.)