VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

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 note to announce that VMETC.com is now optimized for most mobile browsers. I’ve configured the WPTouch plugin for the site so a mobile theme should show up automatically. Various mobile browsers and devices are supported including the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Bookmark the site in your mobile browser!

For quick access from the iPhone or iPod Touch open VMETC.com in the Safari browser, click the  ”+” icon on the bottom bar, choose “Add to Home Screen”, and then marvel at the Virtually Insane icon that appears among your other apps!

Leaving comments should also be an option from the mobile theme, but I have not fully tested that feature.

UPDATED 02.18.10 – Since there are still several mobile devices, Blackberrys, and other PDAs that do not have a browser supported by the WPTouch plugin (hopefully popular devices will continued to be added during the plug in’s devlopment),

I’ve created m.vmetc.com as an alternative for all mobile devices.

This URL is actually a redirect to my RSS Feed converted into a mobile site via Google Reader. You don’t have to open the URL in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) , however. Just bookmark and use the URL. I learned about this quick and easy trick from an old LifeHacker article.

This is just a quick announcement that full posts are now available from the VM /ETC RSS feed. I was only publishing a summary of the posts before now.

Now you can read my content without ever leaving your favorite feed reader. Enjoy!

updated 12.14.08 – VM /ETC was successfully updated to WordPress 2.7! If you notice anything stranger than normal or broken please leave me a comment or send me an email. Thanks, Rich

My Change Control Request to take VM /ETC down for maintenance on 12.13.08 (today) in order to upgrade to WordPress version 2.7 has been reluctantly approved by the Change Control Board. It was not an easy task convincing the Board to allow this upgrade. The Change Control Board is just me, of course!

VM /ETC will experience periods of temporary unavailability from 10 pm to 11 pm EST tonight. Thanks for your patience during this time period, and thanks for reading VM /ETC.