Over the past few months, this blog was being redirected to a website hosting malware. Every time I fixed the problem, it came back within the next few days. I tried several things, like updating to the lastest version of WordPress and changing all of my passwords, but none of them worked. But after reading an article on the I Was Hacked blog, I managed to solve it permanently. The article is very comprehensive, so I will not bother going into details. Instead I want to summarize the steps that I found helpful in solving my problem.
- The first step was to remove the links to malware from my blog. Since only my theme was affected, I just re-uploaded it. This was very easy, since I keep a backup on my computer.
- I installed the WordPress Firewall by seoegghead plugin. This plugin monitors my blogs activity for funny events, and prevents them from happening.
- Within a few hours, I received an email from the plugin notifying me that it had blocked an “WordPress-Specific SQL Injection Attack”. Also it told me that this attack was attempted through the URL “www.krizka.net/wp-content/themes/classic/comments.php”, which contained a very old theme that I haven’t used in a long time and never bothered to delete. Apparently it has a vulnerability that someone managed to exploit.
- I removed the classic theme.
This was a week ago, and this blog has not been hacked again.
Over the winter holiday, the power supply on my main computer died. Since the computer also had some very old parts, I decided to do a full upgrade. All of the parts were bought at NCIX Coquitlam, and they also put it together. Everything seems to work on Linux without a hitch.
Since my original post proved to be very useful when I forgot what parts I put in, I decided to remake it.
AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 (3.1 GHz, 8 cores)
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Graphics Card
Kingston HyperX KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX DDR3 4GB Memory (x2)
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Motherboard
Corsair H60 CPU Cooler System
Antec Truepower 650W Power Supply
Belkin F5D7050 Wireless G USB Adapter *
LG L226WTX-BN 22IN Widescreen LCD *
Antec Nine Hundred Gamer Case *
Seagate Barracuda 250GB Hard Drive *
Samsung Spinpoint F1 Series HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive *
Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green 2TB (x2) *
Samsung SH-S183A DVD Drive *
Cordless Desktop MX5500 Revolution Keyboard and Mouse *
The parts that are marked by a star (*) came from the old computer.
One quandary I came across was whether this constitutes a new computer and should receive a new name. In the end, I decided that it should still be considered as the old computer, since the main hard drive (containing the files I would have to change to rename it….) is still present.