Yep, johndearmond.com got hacked about 3 weeks ago. Very slick hack that didn’t alter the operation of this blog while it tried to inject bad stuff into the reader’s machine. The very fine folks at my host, dreamhost.com [1] found the malicious code during one of their periodic security scans and informed me about it. They also helped me get rid of the bad stuff. That basically involved saving off all my content, deleting WordPress, installing a virgin copy and copying back over my content. A nice afternoon wasted.
I did a dumb thing that allowed the hack. A couple of years ago I was about to make some major changes to my blog so I copied the existing blog over to johndearmond.com.save. There was a vulnerability – later fixed – in that version of WordPress. So while my active copy got its automatic updates, that saved copy just laid there waiting for a malicious robot to find it.
Lesson learned from this: Never leave any detritus laying around on a computer exposed to the web.
This is the first time I’ve ever experienced any form of maliciousness. I run Linux here at home so I’m pretty well shielded from the cruft that attaches to Windows. I agree with others who have said that it makes one feel violated. Just 5 minutes alone with the perp…
John