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My Blog Was Hacked and So Can Yours!

June 27th, 2008   |   Posted in General Stuff.


Photo By FallenPegasus.

I apologize for the lack of updates on this blog as I’ve been quite busy as of late working on my business’s marketing strategy and picking up the slack at the ol’ day job. I decided recently to reference a post that I made on SOHO Happens and was shocked to find that all of my Adsense ads were pharmaceutical ads.

Okay, so I thought to my self, maybe Google is running out of ads to show for this site. But that didn’t make any sense, until I was reviewing the post archives and found a list of drug related links in the post’s excerpt. Aw CRAP! I thought to myself. I quickly logged into Wordpress and deleted the links. I then went through each post to see if any other’s were affected.

Now I had thought that I had solved the dilemma, but this was only the beginning. After checking the number of indexed pages in Google using the “site:” parameter, I was shocked to see that some of the blog posts on this blog had a file size of 500kb or more! I quickly accessed those pages and viewed the page source only to find thousands of drug-related links in the footer.

I then deleted the links from my footer.php file and quickly proceeded to upgrade my Wordpress version to 2.5.1. Although it has only been a few days, I have noticed that some of the ads are going back to normal and that my site is free of those nasty links. Be sure to stay informed on Wordpress’s vulnerabilities and upgrade your blogging software as necessary. Check your file sizes and view your source code periodically and be sure to have a strong admin password.

Oh! If you need something to read in between my updates, check out this freelance work from home blog.

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3 Comments to “My Blog Was Hacked and So Can Yours!”


  1. black cats
    August 7th, 2008 at 9:11 pm

    Oh my god, those pesky hackers. I wonder if it’s because you could be using a slightly outdated version of your blog platform, whether it’s blogger or wordpress, I cannot tell.

    I signed up with a new webhost, over at Softlayer recently, they have very secure servers and a secure platform. I’m thinking about starting my own blog after seeing yours, this is good work.



  2. Allan
    August 8th, 2008 at 3:51 am

    @black cats – As a matter of fact is was an old version of Wordpress.



  3. black cats
    August 8th, 2008 at 6:53 am

    Ahh yes, those hackers generally target outdated versions of software. Usually all it takes is a simple update to the latest version to resolve these kind of hacked issues. Sometimes a clean up like the one you performed as well is required. Glad to hear it’s been taken care of and your back up and running smoothly. hehe


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