It’s been an amazing seven days for me. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t quite take first prize for Most Significant Week Ever. But in my little world it’s running a close second. As of yet I’m not at liberty to document why, but I’m hoping that will change shortly.
Daily Archives: 2008 July 27
Echos of Sins Past
Regular readers of this blog, were there any, would know that in early June, The Mongrel Dogs That Teach was high-jacked by people of malicious intent who inserted “invisible” code into my text to direct people to infected sites and to sites offering badware. This resulted from my neglect of the infrastructure of the site, specifically, from failing to upgrade regularly. Let that be a lesson to you!
Anyway, the malefactors pulled off their dastardly deed using a glitch in WordPress (since fixed) that allows one user to modify the posts of another. So the creeps created a spurious account, leavened my site with their crap, and (as far as I know) moved on. Following advice I found on the Net, I deleted the fake users (institutiong user moderation for the future) and purged their comments, after upgrading the WordPress installation. This, I thought, solved the problem; but I was wrong.
Today, browsing to my own site, I was blocked by Firefox, which told me that Google has deemed the site unsafe. Further investigation made clear that many of my posts were still harboring the vile iframe and noscript tags that causes the problem. I dsicovered admin tools that simplified my search-and-destroy mission, removing the offenders from every post and comment.
Now I’ve submitted a request that Google check the site again and clear it. Let’s hope that works out.
Six days and counting…
… and it’s still all good.