Treknicalities

I haven’t been posting here for the last week or so because I ran into a problem with all of my blogs. My anti-virus software was blocking my blogs because of a trojan horse. I was able to keep Google from blocking the sites by re-installing WordPress, but for reasons I couldn’t figure out, that would only fix the problem for an hour or two and then the infection would be back.

I tried uploading files from a fresh download of WordPress, but that didn’t help. Eventually, I tried disabling all of my plug-ins and that didn’t help, so I deleted all the plugins. When that didn’t work I switched to WordPress’s default theme and deleted all the other themes.

THAT actually fixed it. Having saved local copies of everything I deleted, I looked at all the files for my themes and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. However, since taking the themes off the server fixed the problem, I was satisfied.

I spent a good part of yesterday getting fresh copies of my themes and plug-ins and I plan on spending a good part of today downloading fresh backups of my blogs.

Why is it that all Star Trek fans are characterized as the type of people who wear big plastic-framed glasses with tape holding them together, a horrible case of acne, hair with enough grease to do a lube job on a ’58 Pontiac, and all of them prime candidates for sensa weight loss?

Those stereotypes clearly don’t describe the average Star Trek fan. Those are obviously Star Wars fans.

Just kidding. Please, no hate mail.

After a couple of panicked days trying to find and remove the malware from this blog and my other one, I finally contacted support at my web hosting company. They scanned through my account and told me exactly which files had been affected and how.

Basically, what happened was that someone hacked my FTP password and added a base64-encoded script to a couple of files on each of my blogs. The encoded script looked like this:

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PC9pZnJhbWU+PC9kaXY+JzsNCn0=

only without the line feeds I have added for readability. Out of curiosity, I copied the code and took it to a site that can decode base64-encoding.

I’m not going to re-post the decoded script here. If you’re that curious, you can copy the encoded version above, remove the line breaks, and take it to the URL mentioned above.

Essentially, when this was tacked on to my index.php file, it was saying, “if this page is being loaded from one of these IP addresses, or a browser identified as one of these, then display the page normally. For everyone else, add this iframe, positioned off-screen and very small, that downloads malicious software”.

This is a shining example of why you should keep your passwords long, random, and frequently changed.