We’ve Been Hacked–But We’re Fine Now

As of 1:00 pm yesterday our site had been flagged by Google as a site that’s giving out harmful malware.

Needless to say, it was pretty distressing.  The actual hack probably happened over night the night before.  Someone broke into the file server of the site and added some code that took any visitor to ITM to a random set of sites claiming to treat some kind of Windows Error—which, instead installed malware or viruses!

Hopefully, you’ve all updated your Firefox browser to Firefox 4.0—which made the messages show up as a modal window in the browser instead of making it look like it came from Windows itself.  Also,  I got a big red page telling me that the site was infected.

After a couple hours of work, I managed to find the offending files, purge the hijacked data, and then change the FTP password to something more complex, and submit the site to Google for review.

Let this be a lesson to all those running their own sites, no one is immune to hacks.  Be careful with your passwords and always have backups.

‘Course it doesn’t hurt to be a software engineer, either!

I'm a 35 year old guy married to the most beautiful woman in the world (VirtuousBlonde) for 10 years, and has 5 mostly adorable children-- depending on whether they've had a nap, of course. I'm a software developer by trade, though I like to write on various topics. I got my start in blogging at MInTheGap in 2004 writing about culture, politics and got started talking about modesty on this site just 3 years ago.