Slice of Chaotic Life

The daily life of a celibate middle-aged man.

This blog was hacked

Posted by Itlandm on March 14, 2012

Evidently WordPress blogs are pretty easy to hack if they are not updated constantly, so I assume that was the reason. There was no defacing, it was just loaded up with scripts that would try to infect visitors without sufficient defense and send them to some kind of Russian malware house or something. The fact that someone had logged in from the UK was not very heartening either.

I have deleted both of my blogs and tried to reinstall. With this one it seems to have succeeded. The fresh install should be as safe as these things get. That is not much, I think: There were nearly 8000 infected files, none of which were made by me. There is something just wrong about having thousands of non-content files for a trivial thing like a personal blog.

I do not know whether I will continue to use this blogging software or go back to the old format. Actually, I plan to do the following: Delete plugins and themes I am sure I don’t need. Mark it as auto-upgrade (Dreamhost, my webhost, has come through with flying colors in this case and I will definitely use their services). Then I will continue to use these blogs as before, Light willing. If it gets infected again after that, I will return to the hand-coded format. This takes more time so probably means less updates, though.

Now to try yet another re-install of the primary blog and hope I can recover the couple years of entries that lie there. If I could get this one back, it should be possible to also get the Chaos Node online.

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