UPDATE: Site recovering from attack
One member reported getting some virus errors when trying to visit Redline Derby. Turns out they were right but this goes way beyond this web site and turns out my entire host of sites has been attacked. What this entails I'm still not entirely sure and I have done some things to remove trouble but as long as I've been in computers, I know things will be coming back until I can find the root of the problem.
That being said, please be careful and let me know if you see anything wrong or if any of your malware/virus checkers go off. Mail me werace[at]redlinederby.com rather than use the PM through the forum.
I run about a dozen other sites and they all have the same problem so this is a widespread situation. To help limit spreading, this forum and other sites may be going on and offline over the next couple days. Hard to say what else this will impact or harm.
I'm working at my best and fastest to get this resolved but I also don't want anyone contracting anything from my web site. I'll be working at this non-stop until I can find a resolution. I don't think this has infected any of the database so threads and records should be safe if I have to delete everything and re-install.
And that's that. Sorry for the trouble and I hope you don't lose faith in Redline Derby. I shall prevail!!
Discussion
Okay well, here's the status of things. As you can see, E-MAIL ME so I can investigate.
The clues do seem to point to the Wordpress blogging platform as the culprit, which is the what the RDR blog used as well as all the blogs on my other web sites.
I've had to shut off ALL of the web sites I host and I'm going to have to review each one to determine how big the problem is within each one and which ones are worth repairing. The only good thing about all of this is it's forcing me to purge a lot of old stuff so when I come out on the other side I should have a very neat and tidy web server.
None of the data was harmed in these attacks. I have all the blog posts, threads and other stuff for all my sites but that doesn't mean I'll be able to hook those sources up to new installs. I can only hope at this point. The RDR blog didn't have many posts, honestly but my personal blog had posts going back to 2005 so I'll probably focus on getting that blog back up to working order first.
All of this is just a big pain in the ass that I'm really not happy about. At this rate, the fantasy league may have to skip the Spring season and just start up in the summer. I dunno...hard to say how long repairing all my sites will take along with everything else going on. Nonetheless, the forums are here and should remain up for the immediate future.
My apologies for trouble, worry and inconvenience. This community is the heart of Redline Derby and I want to make sure we are protected from not only attacks like this but data loss as well. They can make me reinstall stuff all day long if they want, I just can't afford to lose the years of data that has helped make RDR a great place to hang out.
More soon...
Hey Brian,
I did a blog on Blogger for 3 years and spent countless hours working on it, and it got all jacked up from a virus attacks. Long story short I just deleted the whole blog and right away some crappy bull crap took over my domain name.
Anyway, I feel your pain. Thanks for working to get it all fixed and not giving up on the whole thing. Also, I second if there's anything we can do, I'm sure the regulars in the forums would be more than happy to help out.
Thanks again.
Thanks, everyone. I've been slowing rebuilding all the sites that were affected. The best solution in any type of attack is to just clear the forest and start over. It sucks but at the same time it's nice to have a chance to clean-up some stuff. I'm just happy I was able to keep this forum up.
Blogs are somewhat secondary these days. My personal blog just got rebooted last night with a nice, generic Wordpress install - http://www.morningtoast.com - The lack of design and writing isn't what bothers me the most, it's the search engine work that might get lost. Most of the stuff had been online for years and ranked up some good Google juice. My fear is that with the blog content down my stock will drop a bit, but it is what it is.
The last month or so the home page was shifted to the left and down with some techno-babble above the header. Might have been my crappy computer.
Bummer. Been there done that. I had installed WordPress once and just left it there and never used it. Little did I know new versions of the software were out there and I never updated it which left holes into my site and i didnt have a good database backup and some things that used the database had to be started over.