Overnight my blog was infected with some malicious code that forwarded visitors away from my site. Scarily, it seemed to be multiplying rapidly so we needed to isolate/remove it urgently. No idea how it got through my firewall ....
David and I spent hours trawling through html and eventually found the code that had been added - repeated in two places - but it couldn't be edited out through the control panel, even using the html editor. The code had attached itself inside two widgets. Removing the widgets took the code away. In my case the 'clock' and the 'calendar' widgets were the carriers.
It looks like it wasn't an attack on my website; it was an attack on the widgets and everyone who uses them. I've had no response from the Help Teams/Forum at Google - despite sending them several emails. I can see from the forums that this has happened to a lot of Bloggers recently.
If anybody is on the receiving end of this nasty code - email me and hopefully I can save you hours of searching. I won't show the (very long) offending code here in case it 'bursts into life'. I'd hate to be responsible for perpetuating it
Friday, 5 March 2010
8 comments:
Thanks for visiting my Blog. Let me know what you think :-)
I have disabled the Captcha requirement at the request of followers who find it irritating when posting comments. However to stop the subsequent flood of spam posts I can no longer accept comments from Anonymous sources.
Apologies if this is a problem
Thank you
Sue
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I'm glad you've found and solved the problem.
ReplyDeleteWhat a bummer Sue,but leastways it is sorted now and thanks for the headups! I am afraid that help is very slow coming from google in these matters, response can take up to a week sometime.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we both had real headaches by lunchtime but got there in the end. There are some VERY sad people out there I think!!!
ReplyDeleteWhat a nuisance!!! Glad you managed to get it sorted.
ReplyDeleteThanks Laura - it was a miserable few hours whilst we were trying to sort it out I have to say. Thought at one stage I'd have to abandon my blog and start another one :o(
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I won't be adding any gadgets/widgets from now on - even the followers gadget was suspect for a while.
So glad you got it all taken care of. If it's happening to other Bloggers, I imagine that Google is being inundated with complaints but hopefully, they can solve the problem across the board.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up about it!
Hi Jan. Still no news from Google! Its a shame as I'm now worried about putting the 'followers' gadget back on my home page - I'm not bothered about the calendar or the clock as these were really just 'space fillers'. According to the experiences of other Bloggers who have been affected - this 'malicious code' has been found in a variety of gadgets/widgets so its non-predictable.
ReplyDeleteWOW what a nasty. Thank you for telling us so we can watch our for this sort of thing. Glad you sorted it ...but how frustrating with all the searching for it.
ReplyDeleteNo more gadgets/widgets for me either.