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It Happened To Me

Started by Barb , author of Mom Off Track 3/13/2010 8:25:26 AM
Not minutes after I posted in the thread about hosts (which I KNOW has nothing to do with it) I realized something was wrong with my blog.

I got a google alert telling me that my latest post was indexed as BUY FRONTPAGE OEM CHEAP

OK, weird I thought. I went to my blog but everything was fine. Guess I was feeling lazy cause I let it go until the next day I got something very similar. Check blog, fine, but this time I went to my google cached. Sure enough, while my blog looked fine to the average reader, it was being changed behind the scenes to search engines.

I took screen shots and started reaching out for help (thanks RACHEL). It took me 5 days of digging and research, reading all the big names this has happened to (Scoble for example) to come up with what I hope is now a clean blog and a much more secure one.

The thing for me is that all 10 blogs on my server were infected. It got in through one of my friends who didn't update at 2.8.3 right away and uses filezilla, which has a common password hack issue.

Obviously I am not about to post on my blog everything I did to fix it but because I had to walk a few friends through it I wrote down 25 steps to take if this happens to you. If you want it, email me at barb@chaoticcommunications.com and I will send the doc over. It is WAY to long to post here.

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Reply by Tracy

author of Tracys Nook 3/13/2010 9:05:00 AM
That stinks.... though I am glad that you were able to figure out what happened and fixed it.  Viruses/bugs can really create a major mess 
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Reply by Jenny

author of Home is where you start from 3/13/2010 11:33:25 AM
Barb, this scares me that it happened to someone as knowledgeable as you.  I am really not tech savvy...can you explain to me how you got a google alert? Is it something through google analytics?  I only put google analytics on my blog a few days ago, so I don't understand how to read all the reports. 

thanks for sharing your experience, it serves as a big warning. Glad you got it fixed!
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Reply by Barb

author of Mom Off Track 3/13/2010 2:10:49 PM
Jenny-Sharon did an awesome job on google alerts above. I, too, have them set up for all the names in my family and numerous other things related to my sites.

Sharon-I will post it here in parts.

I was hacked because they were able to get into a version of wordpress that was not upgraded. From their they created a fake user and started injecting mysql malware which wormed its way around the server. Almost every blog had a fake admin installed. Some of the names were MYSQL and Feedburner.

So the two biggest things are to check your admin users for anything odd and keep your blog and plugins updated.

The rest is below. I will break it up so it posts