Oh man, the past 2 months or so have been an interesting ride for Cultivate Greatness. Someone with ill intentions had exploited a hole in WordPress and attached some porn to my RSS feed, which thankfully, was incorrect code, so my RSS feeders didn’t see it, but Google did. They in turn stopped sending ads to the site, and they took me out of all of the Google Search Engine Results Pages.
Now, this is a very tough thing to have occur. The Adsense coin can come in quite handy, and mine dried up mid-November. At first, I had NO idea why. Then someone told me that my feed wasn’t showing up in their feed reader and that I needed to look into it. Well, come to find out, there was pretty nasty text links to some sites showing up when I went to do a feed validation on feedburner.com.
This was very tricky to pinpoint where the information was. What the hacker did was go into wp-blog-header.php file and attach another file via php. It listed something to the effect of eval(base64_decode(“CiBwcmludCAiPHUgc3…”) at the bottom of the wp-blog-header file. This linked to the file that had the porn links. This file would precede my rss feed. It was a file named text.php and it had all the porn links that linked back to an education site, called Newman.edu/moodledata. There were no pictures on each page that links went to, only vulgar text.
Also, at the footer of my wordpress file, was this code
< u style="display:none;" id=pizdenka>< ? php eval(base64_decode("c3lzdGVtKCd....") which was a different string of characters. This right here is why my feed didn't work, as they didn't code it properly. So, it nullified my feed, but thankfully, didn't send porn links out to all my readers. At least not that I know of.
This is dangerous business, as I am sure that having my feed messed up, caused me to lose several hundred readers in the time that feed was messed up. Plus, it took 2 months to get reindexed into Google's search pages. This whole ordeal cost me a couple thousand dollars in lost income, but more importantly lost traffic and lost lives that CultivateGreatness could positively effect.
So. I suppose the moral of the story is to update your WordPress files so as to eliminate any possible vulnerabilities to your site. There are malicious people out there, who apparently don't like people spreading positive messages. They would rather bring down a good thing to make themselves feel better about their less than mediocre life. But, I hold no malice toward them, they are obviously misled, and things find a way to come back around on those type of people tenfold.
In fact, I am happy and grateful that it enabled me to update the site with a fresh look, and feel that excitement again of seeing your page at the top of Google's search results. And watching my traffic explode once again. Today i s a great day. CultivateGreatness has been revived from the depths of trickling traffic, and my feed works again!
Oh happy, happy, joy, joy! Update your wordpress, people! And spread the word, because this can affect a lot of otherwise happy bloggers.
Successfully,
Travis Wright
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Glad you were able to get things back on track. I look forward to reading more great thoughts from CG in 2008!
“…There are malicious people out there, who apparently don’t like people spreading positive messages. They would rather bring down a good thing to make themselves feel better about their less than mediocre life….”
I dont think that “theY” are upset with you spreading positive messages, I think they were more concerned with spamming as many people as possible with porn…
Thanks for sharing this important information.