Blog Update

Ugh. Argh. Arglebargle.

Malware is gone (finally).

I’m still dealing with some of the fallout. The domain that is my actual name is still marked as malware even though it is clean. (I can’t even type it here or this site might get flagged for linking to THAT site).

A hundred thousand billion thanks to Brad-O, who dedicated an evening of (hopefully delightfully drunken) debugging to fix the issue.

Are you Infected?

ALL OF YOU SHOULD BE FINE.

I repeat, all of you should be fine. There were iframes that linked to bad content that had been injected into my code, but it shouldn’t have done anything to you.

Please run virus scans or whatever else might doublecheck your systems, just to be sure. I’m not saying don’t be smart about it.

I’m just saying please don’t worry. It’s highly unlikely that anyone got infected from my site. And it’s EXTREMELY unlikely that I’ll get infected again. Brad-O installed some pretty hefty security software and I’ve been blocking IP addresses that have been hammering at my newly-secured admin accounts.

Why does the site look so funny?

Well, that’s because it was my theme that was infected. All those custom changes I made so that it looked better than it had out of the box? Poof. Gone. They weren’t the cause of the issue, but since I didn’t properly create a child theme when I made the changes, upgrading the theme removed all my pretties.

That being said, rather than try to fix this theme, I think I’m going to go off the rails and make my own theme.

I’m tired of tweaking other people’s stuff to try and suit myself. Especially when stuff like THIS happens and makes me doubt the safety of those themes.

It’s going to Look Weirder Before it Gets Better

I am going to be activating my new theme as soon as it’s reached the “barely usable” stage.

Then I’m going to chip away at improving it till I am pleased with it. I do have an end-game in mind, and a few nights of solid coding should get it pretty far along that path, but it’s easier to do those tweaks if the site is already using the theme I’m testing.

 

P.S. This really sucked

I don’t know why this has become a thing, but I’m not completely useless when it comes to coding and wordpress, but I would not have been able to fix this without Brad-O’s help. The WordPress community seemed to take a very nose-in-the-air “if you can’t fix this, you shouldn’t be using wordpress” mentality, with lots of links to helpful articles that suggested I “find the problem and fix it.”

My web host let me know in no uncertain terms that “code” problems are not their problem and I should get “my webmaster” to fix the problem for me.

As many of you know, I was on the verge of just nuking the site. No more blog. Years of content destroyed.

All because my little insignificant site came up on someone’s brute force hacking list.

Not that the hackers will ever read this and feel any sympathy towards us small-time self-hosters, but I was very disappointed at the tools I could find to try and solve my own problem.

… but it did have its upside

I am very very proud to have friends (not just Brad-O! but I don’t want to out someone who might prefer to remain anonymous) who took my hands, talked me down from the ledge, and did their damnedest to help me get back online.

You guys are amazing.