VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘rss’

Earlier this week VMETC.com fell victim to a WordPress hack that redirected readers to a malware infested site. Best estimate is that early Thursday morning (9/17) the site was compromised by an attacker that was able to add several lines of code to the beginning of every PHP file in my public_html directory. With several other WordPress sites hosted in the same directory, there were thousands of files that needed to be cleaned up. All site RSS feeds were rendered unavailable as a result.

The hacker left a “silence is golden” message in a few of the files. There are 18,900 hits on Google for this WordPress attack.

Lucky for me, the social community not only notified me of the issue (thanks Ken Fury, @kculw, @ericsiebert and @jasonboche), but came to the rescue as well.

@SirStan (Stan Brinkeroff), A Twitter follower (that I follow as well), offered some assistance if needed and I jumped at the chance.  Stan figured out the exploit, identified the rogue code, deciphered it’s evil, implemented a temporary work around for Friday night, and then found, tweaked,  and t-shooted the script to bulk remove the offending lines in each file. Stan is definitely a PHP master and a ‘nix wizard. For saving this site Stan is now an Ugly Green Hero as well!

Stan lost 3+ hrs of his weekend to help me. I hope the VMETC and VIRTUMANIA t-shirts I am sending him are an adequate payment (let me know if not, Stan).

VMETC.com and VIRTUMANIA.net are back in business. Please let me know if anything is still messed up.

Do me a huge favor, tweet @sirstan and tell him thanks and great job! I can’t say it enough by myself.

This is just a quick follow up post on my blog aggregation rant from the end of June. A couple of constructive ideas for change came out of that exercise, and as a result I have implemented a second RSS feed through feedburner containing just a content summary for VM /ETC posts. The new feed can be subscribed to by any individual or aggregated by other blogs / web sites.

The summary feed is available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/vmetc/summary

You can still get the full posts by subscribing with your favorite RSS reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/vmetc (or click on the RSS icon in the right column of this site).