On Saturday morning I opened this blog only to have my computer scream at me that “THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTER!” Google was advertising the fact to the world, too. Let me start by saying, the problem is fixed and the crap infecting me does not appear to have been shared with anyone else. It turns out some kind of nasty malware had been inserted into an old page template but I had no chance of finding it. So I would like to give a big “Thanks!” to Sucuri.net, who checked, scrubbed and purged the site of the nasty stuff.
Being infected made me feel angry, dirty and pretty damn powerless. I am okay at managing the appearance and content of the site, and can even sling a little html, but all the deep behind the scenes stuff is gobbledy-gook to me. I was so upset (wow, I was upset, I just hadn’t processed that before) that I was ready to just shut the site down and forget about blogs. I felt guilty that my site might infect others, and felt somewhat violated by whatever thing had crept into my system. It seems a little silly now, but I was over it. I did a little web search to try and find out more, and a number of people talked about similar issues to what I was suffering (all with the same hasting provider, but I am not getting into that today). Luckily, a number of sites referred me to Sucuri.net and their services. It is a pay service, so I was not sure at first – I make no money from my website and seem to spend a fair bit on it. But I realised I had no chance of finding and fixing the problem without help. Sucuri found and fixed the issue while I slept all warm in my bed and when I woke up in the morning had a report on where the problem was, what they had done to fix and and what I should do to keep my site safe in the future. They even contacted Google to get the site reviewed and off the “blacklist”. Their service was great, though waiting for google to remove the fear-inducing warning took another 24 hours (but Sucuri sent me another email when that was resolved too).
This is all beginning to sound like an infomercial. All I am getting at is, my site is clean and healthy again (Yay!) and if you experience problems like I did, you might want to check out Sucuri.net
Yep. Came here last week and my virus protection said I should leave. I thought…NOooooo! I have been coming to your site since last year and this was the first time I received this warning. Glad you got inoculated. I wish the government would crack down on this hooligans. A lot of people, including me, can not afford a new computer if it is infected with a virus that can not be cleaned.
Yep, it really pissed me off when I found out. My first clue was a comment on RPG.net, but I wasn’t seeing any problems, then two days later Google and my computer protection were all like “Danger!” I am just glad I got it sorted!