Posted on by Terry White

What’s Going On With My Sites?

In case you haven't noticed, I've been having issues with my site lately. I've been getting hacked lately AND my hosting provider Network Solutions has been having Server issues at least two weekends in a row. Let's just say there have been a lot of sleepless nights in the past couple of weeks.

The Hacks

The hacks have been coming in two flavors. The first is some how they've hacked the titles of my post that get indexed by Google. So if you were to Google "terry white tech blog" you'd get some interesting titles to my site. The links sill work, so I'm not sure I see the purpose behind that particular attack. The other more recent attack has been far more troublesome. It's an injection of code throughout my site files that point to a different server know to serve up malware to unsuspecting visitors. That's the one that is yielding the warnings above in both Safari and Chrome browsers and that's the one that's been the biggest pain to deal with.

Chrome users – To make matters worse Google has now flagged my main domain terrywhite.com as a "suspicious" site. Therefore until that times out or until they rescan my site from my request you'll be "warned" about visiting ANY of my sites at the moment. Even if the infections are completely cleared out there's nothing I can do to get rid of this warning until Google rescans it and clears. I have to wait it out.

 

Moving Forward

While I think I'm on the other side of all these problems now and I'm starting to see my way clear of these issues, I was once again reminded of one of he principles I try to live by and that is "always have a backup and a plan B!" I don't expect technology to always work or to be perfect. Nothing is. This is why we have backups and contingency plans. So I started thinking about that a lot lately when it comes to my websites. I also haven't been extremely satisfied lately with my hosting provider as I don't feel like they've had my back during these issues as much as they could have. So it made me start to shop around for other hosting companies. While I'm certainly not settled in on another company just yet, I do now have a backup to this blog!

 

Plan B

For the time being while I sort this all out I will be posting my content in two places. Here on the existing tech blog AND on my new (backup) tech blog:

http://terrywhitetechblog.com

The NEW (backup) blog is hosted by GoDaddy.com. While I'm not 100% sold on them yet, they do come highly recommended by my buddy RC over at Layers Magazine. I know that no hosting provider has 100% up time. However, I do expect issues to be resolved as quickly as possible when sh*t happens! So for now while I continue to weigh my options, you have another place to see my posts in case this server goes down again and until I ultimately decide what to do. Files have been cleaned and ALL passwords have been changed. Fingers crossed!

Thanks for your patience and continued support!

22 Replies to “What’s Going On With My Sites?”

  1. Terry,

    Sorry to hear about all of your tech troubles. If you want rock solid hosting with exceptional tech support, Liquid Web and Rackspace are your two best options. I’m not affiliated with them and I use a much cheaper host since I don’t get zillions of visitors, but if any hosts will have your back, it’s them.

    -Rob

  2. i was about to email you with this info when i saw your post about it. i’ll go to the new site from now on.

    i remember that the other day, the site was forcing me to download some sort of .vbe file …

  3. Hi Terry,

    You also seem to have changed your RSS feed format, and removed the body of each post from the RSS feed, any chance of putting it back, now each time I read one of your posts I have to click the link to go to your site instead of reading it in my RSS Reader.

    Thanks

    Mike

    1. I just re-checked to make sure and it’s still set to Full Text and it came into my reader as the full article. No changes were made to it that I’m aware of.

      1. I’ve only had titles in Google Reader since March 11. It might be Google stopping the full content, since they flagged the site.

  4. You posted this entry at 12:05 (probably my local time) and I`m writing this at 14:26. To get here I had to bypass the “warning, somebody has too much time to spare and fiddled with some malware” sign. I said “ok, i trust him, let me in!”. And immediately nod32 blocked an attack from a remote server. I guess somebody is still trying his best to annoy us all. I`m using Chorme and the same thing happens in both Safari and IE8.

  6. I just got to your site from google reader. unfortunately reader only listed the title of the post and not the content.. As soon as I got here AVG reported a trojan trying to attack my computer. I’m browsing with google chrome.

      1. I’m seeing the same thing with the titles only appearing in my news feed (using NetNewsWire).
        The RSS feed on your backup site seems to have solved the problem for me.

  7. Terry,

    I’m sorry these idiots are hacking your site. Best of luck in getting it all sorted out.

    Leslie

  8. Hi Terry,

    Thanks for addressing this. I was wondering what the issue was all about. I thought it was just my computer. Hopefully it’ll all be a thing of the past.

    Harry

  9. This has happened to me before and it sucks. It would be worth it to get the issue if i could have 30 minutes with the people who do it. I’d make a YouTube vid and the would be a deterrent! LOL best of luck Terry

    Mike

  10. I was wondering what was going on when I got the warning message this morning. Too bad they could not channel their energy into something constructive.

  11. Hi Terry, it’s Susan from Network Solutions, sorry for the downtime you’ve been experiencing. Regarding the WordPress issue, we believe the issue is with the WordPress plugin or installation. We have reached out to experts in the WordPress community to help us with this situation. It’s not an issue on our web hosting servers. We understand that this issue may be impacting users across other hosting platforms. Just wanted to let you know that we’re working on it.

  13. Something definitely very wierd going on. I visited on a PC yesterday and was prompted for some plugin installation from a site I didn’t recognize. Definitely seems like malware or something else. I basically had to shut down the browser using task manager since everything was locking up.

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