You might have noticed that, twice now, instead of seeing Clean Hippie when you arrive to this URL, you’ve been confronted with a giant read “Caution!!!” redirect.
Thank you, Google. Yes, my blog was infected with malware. I made the mistake, probably more than six months ago now, of believing an email I received purporting to be from a French advertising agency who wanted to place Lacoste ads on my site.
Duh, Alden, of course it’s a hoax. It was a sophisticated one, though. Their grammar was great, especially considering they were French. They were very responsive, with detailed instructions on how to serve the ads. So I followed them.
After I did what the instructions asked, I noticed the ads were showing up with their placement slightly off. I asked my tech-y friend to take a look, and he G-chatted me a website with people talking about how it was a scam. I deleted the plug-in the evil French (?) hackers had asked me to install.
Now the malware just keeps coming back. “Clever little mother-f’ers,” I said to my tech-y friend, as he spend more than three hours pouring over my code, finding new backdoors through which the hackers kept pouring more malware inside my pretty, innocuous, naive little blog, even when we thought it was clean.
I don’t even understand why people do this. Honestly? I get the hacking group Anonymous‘ raison d’etre. They mess with the Man, like banks and news sites they don’t like. But my blog? I don’t really get it.
Anyway, my site should be all cleaned up now. And I’m taking my very smart, very kind tech-y friend to dinner.
If it comes up again, don’t hesitate to tweet me and let me know, like the fabulous @BlondeonaBudget did yesterday.
