Following my last post Just the Ticket, where I expanded on the use of up and coming events to boost the popularity of your own blog I hit a bit of a stumbling block with this blog.

Some nice person hacked into it and left a load of malware on some of the posts.

Well, it cost me a couple hours sorting it all out and cleaning all the bad code from the database - I’m not happy about it because Google slapped a warning over the front of the blog meaning no one could read it until it was clear. Not exactly the message I want to be sending out to my readers that this blog is full of malware that some nasty little hacker has posted into it for whatever reason these irksome subhumans justify their very existance for.

What goes around comes around and I hope that the swine who did this get’s their just desert.

So that will lead on to what to do when you find that your sitehas been compromised?

Well, at first you need to get in and assess the damage. Usually the hacker will have left malware code in some of your blog’s posts and it will be hidden in the html code, so you won’t necessarily see it just by looking at the blog homepage.

So you’ll need to get into your blog’s admin panels and check the html not just of your posts (all of them) but also the files - sometimes the hacker will have added a few lines of code in your header or main index.php page. Also check your sidebar especially if you have ads in there. It is likely the hacker will have changed the affiliate links in your ads to someone else’s.

Next is to get access to your server and check all the files in your blog folder. The hacker may well have gained access to your server and added some files or editied some existing ones and added malware code, javascript or cgi programs. Delete any files you know don’t belong there. They are usually easy to spot as their last updated dates will be recent and different from the other files in the folders.

Once everything is clean again, you should be able to carry as normal. It would be worth changing your passwords for your server’s ftp access and cPanel. Also check the permissions for your main folders. They may be set as 777, which is way too easy to access, so you should alter the main public_html folder to 755 which will make it more secure.

If in doubt, contact your host provider and they should be able to help you.

Terry Didcott
Make Money