“Spontaneous” new install in 2.8.4

I recently found that the normal front page of my blog (https://roddo.net/wordpress) as well as the admin page was being redirected to (https://roddo.net/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php). I hadn’t accessed the blog for a little over a week, with my last posting being added in late August. It has been running 2.8.4 since before then.

My first thought was that someone had compromised the access and somehow reset the MySQL db and I needed to do some sort of recovery from a non-up-to-date backup. While despairing for the lost Sunday afternoon that this would entail I by chance browsed to https://roddo.net/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php to see what would happen. The message was that “No Upgrade Required, Your WordPress database is already up-to-date!” and that I could click “Continue” which I did, at which point the blog came back as it had been before with the exception of having multiple “About” pages, each with the default text, all created a couple of days ago.

I’m hoping someone could suggest possible reasons for this having happened, and specifically whether I’ve done something or failed to do something that has left my blog open to exploit or unauthorised meddling.