Eban Crawford dot Com

A Clean Non-Hacker Version Phoenix

The R.F. Lucidity has had some rough sailing lately. As you know from my earlier posts, I, Eban, the resident mondo maniac pirate, have been ill. Twice in three weeks. It has been a time of suck due to the illness. Unfortunately, an older drama of suck has been going on both here at ECdotC and at Reaching for Lucidity. We got hacked! Argh!

Over the last month and a half, at least, I have been poring over line after line of code. I have been cleaning all the barnacle riddled mess left behind by the scalawag hackers. No sooner would I have the sites working properly and all my passwords changed when the damned exploit would rise up again. It was like a phoenix. A damned, dirty, filthy, jackassed phoenix, but a phoenix none the less.

Hackers Dojo? Hackers are NINJAS! No match for a self-respecting Mondo Manic PIRATE!

Hackers are by design smarter than us other folk. Too bad they don’t use their powers for good. No worry though, they are pussies and I am the mondo maniac pirate of RfL. Smarts don’t figure in this fight!

The problem was that the hackers had left behind a backdoor which they used to continually relaunch their spooge-like goo plague on my sites, and by extension, my readers. You would never know by looking at my sites in a web browser. The damage was visible on mobile browsers. My sites were filled with pharma spam. Lot’s of it I tell you!

Worse yet, Google could see it. You can’t hide crap from those spiders they let loose on the world. Even the best pirate crew just get out-of-the-way and let those nosy beasts do their gathering for the Google.

Well, I finally tired of the whole mess. I yet again changed all my passwords. This time it was my next step that changed. I did not go through my site code and clean out the intruding mush. No. I backed up all my custom content and my config files and then I sent my sites off the end of the plank. I deleted my WordPress installs, the very keel of the R.F. Lucidity pirate operations.

I then went through the process to bring fresh, clean installs into my servers. This was odd as we pirates are not used to clean, especially us steampunk pirates that also happen to beat people up for a hobby. We usually stay at a just above healthy level of base grime. We made the exception this time and the installs went forth into the vast expanse of RfL server-land.

I then reintroduced all the custom content and crossed my fingers for Reaching for Lucidity. For an extra step, I moved this here pirate island to WordPress.com while I executed the cleanup procedures. I then got to move it back to the all new clean digs.

As a last, and yes, redundant step, I yet again changed every password I could find.

I am happy to proclaim, SUCCESS! Both RfL and ECdotC are finally fully free of nasty hacker phlegm and oddities. We have survived the attack and yet again sail in clean inter-web tube thingys.

Not to be outdone, I also am seriously deep in the process of kicking this damn second illness. This means training will be back on soon. It takes a lot of training to be a boxing, steampunk driven, mondo maniac pirate creator of the web.

But heh, someone has to do it.

Hackers, scum I tell you!

Cheers!

Hacker Dojo pic by mightyohm

Phoenix pic by Blindpuppetry