bl(e)nd|wire.net Blog

Remember a few weeks ago there was all that noise about WordPress blogs getting hacked? Remember how everyone was urged to upgrade their blogs. You did upgrade didn’t you? No? It was inevitable that you’d be hacked. If you haven’t been hacked yet, it’s only a matter of time.

If you’re like the rest of those poor, lazy saps that got their Wordpress site hacked, it’s time to clean up and upgrade.  And if you don’t know if your site got hacked, before you read this article, read my earlier tip on how to tell using a text-based-browser.

I’m not going to repeat what Holy Shmoly! has already written.  But if you managed to find this article first, please (PLEASE!!!) head over to their blog and read the full article on how to protect your site from the scumbags…

If you’ve been hacked

1. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.
2. Make sure there are no backdoors or malicious code left on your system. This will be in the form of scripts left by the hacker, or modifications to existing files. Check your theme files too.
3. Change your passwords after upgrading and make sure the hacker didn’t create another user.

So I downloaded Lynx browser and opened up one of my blogs in a text-only format and what do I find? It’s all spam! Spam and more spam! Apparently the site that I thought was about my personal life is actually (or was until I fixed it) about buying drugs. I was, inadvertently, helping people obtain black market viagra. Or cialis. Or some other pill. Somehow my Wordpress them had been hi-jacked. A clean install and some password shuffling, and all is well.

But it was scary, and probably was aversely effecting my search engine optimization.

Bummer.

So I recommend you download Lynx post-haste and open up your site. Another good idea is to use Google Webmaster Tools and see what their Googlebot is seeing. You might find that while your top keywords should be “computer” or “game” they are in fact “viagra” and “xanax” which might make your adsense show some pretty off-topic adds.

Wouldn’t want that, would you?