I want happy music
08.01.09
I have spent a lot of time lately doing the sort of thing that isn’t really supposed to be a big part of my life, namely site admin for my websites. In theory, you see, it’s all sorted out that every once in a while I go and upgrade WordPress, and otherwise, I just post bits and pieces to the site, comment on stuff, issue rants if that’s necessary, and then go about my business.
Three weeks ago, Dancing Shades of Light got hacked. In short order, so did Winds and Breezes and my own other site, the Treasalynch.com one which I’ve never really got working the way I wanted. I killed the installs on treasalynch.com and started from scratch. Since then, that’s been okay. The other two, I cleaned out, upgraded the wordpress installs and went through the hassle of getting them passed as non-malware by Google. This took a day or so but I got the clean bill of health, went off on my merry way, and then, the two of them got hacked a second time. So I did the whole palaver that I had done with treasalynch, cleaned out and got rid of all the content, rebuilt the sites from scratch. Pretty much repeated what I had done on treasalynch.com in other words. They both got hacked again.
In fact, I think that Dancing Shades got hacked once more than than Winds and Breezes but in the end, since I had none of the content any more, having cleaned everything out, and the sites were still getting trashed and marked as nasty by Google, and I have really no time to be doing this, I decided to abandon the sites.
I’ve a couple of things to note. I’m guessing that the sites were subject to Gumblar style attacks so I don’t understand why, for example, treasalynch.com didn’t get hammered a second time when the other two were hammered several times. I got several notes from my hosting provider which they sent to all their customers telling me to check my virus updates and run scans. Well I’d done all that and even despite all that, my virus checker was coming back with a clean bill of health – EVERY SINGLE TIME – so the theory that the infection was coming from my local machine doesn’t strike me as absolutely right, particularly when only 2 of the sites – coincidentally on the same hosting package – were getting trashed and the third, on a different package but at the same hosting provider seemed to escape. I really don’t understand this. The only difference on my side is that treasalynch.com was rebuilt using Joomla rather than Wordpress.
When I was cleaning up the sites, although there was a lot of information about Gumblar, nothing that I managed to track down suggested that it definitely was Gumblar, so I don’t know. The most similar one that I could track down pointed to a problem with my host’s control panel software as in this is the infestation I had but that’s not the control panel they were using as far as I know. All in all, it was a giant headache, one I really could do with out.
Because of changes on my hosts side, I also had a learning curve involving their new panel software and applications installer which is basically useless to my needs compared, for example, to what they had on their older system. They changed a lot of things that I really had to go looking for. Website related hassles have been my constant companion for around 3 weeks now. I hope they are gone.
My iPod is bumping up the most miserable stuff at me on shuffle at the moment. I really need to start making playlists again.