Comments on: Alan November’s website was hacked

By: Ryan Collins

Ryan Collins — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:56:04 +0000

Usually, the hacked WordPress sites will show Google a different page than normal web browsers, so the owner or users of the site do not notice anything different but Google will get incorrect information. I had a site that was hacked, and the reason I noticed it was because the hack screwed up the RSS feed for Google Reader. It was a bear to track down because when I would troubleshoot the site I would get the correct RSS feed, but Google Reader would still be messed up.

By: Wesley Fryer

Wesley Fryer — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:33:54 +0000

Wow Mark, I had never heard that about blogs on nlcommunities. What a bummer. Glad you made mirrors of most of the content. There’s an important lesson learned in itself.

By: Mark Ahlness

Mark Ahlness — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:18:36 +0000

Sorry to hear this, but I find it interesting, when you consider the total shutdown of http://nlcommunities.com a year ago because they were not able to keep up with the software upgrades needed to maintain their blog. No chance to transfer to another platform. Nothing, except word that it would be gone – soon. And it was. My school’s student newsletter that was hosted there for three years is now gone for that period. Luckily, I mirrored (most of) it on a personal site. While I appreciate the philosophies, motivational speeches, conferences, etc – it does make me wonder about priorities there…

By: Joshua Williams

Joshua Williams — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:40:54 +0000

These are particularly frustrating hacks, and the offensive code isn’t always easy to track down (even viewing the HTML source). I’ve noticed tha WordPress is unfortnately a frequent target, due in no small part to it’s popularity. In addition to what you mentioned, it’s important to make sure your php files are secure, as that is a popular way of stealing authentication information. Also, users of solutions like WordPress and Joomla that use third party plugins should keep those updated as well.

These problems could really hit home for schools in the next couple of years as the FCC will likely disallow E-Rate funding of web hosting, forcing many smaller districts to host their own sites for the first time in many years.

Best of luck to Alan and everyone else dealing with these problems.