Site Panic

19-02-2010

It isn't everyday that you get an email from your hosting company telling you they have changed some passwords on you. Generally you only ever hear from the hosting company when A) You sign up B) You have to pay them money or C) The world has ended.

Turns out that yesterday was my option C, so to speak.

Apparently a number of websites hosted by my hoster had been hacked by something called a Gumblar Exploit and they had taken the precautionary measure of changing everyone's passwords to their accounts.

It would seem the Internet is still a strange and scary sorta place. I by no means claim to be a security wizard when it comes to computers or coding but I was fairly sure that my lil site wasn't that vulnerable.

So I pulled down all the code and did some scanning of the files to see if anything had been tampered with or changed or was different from the local version of code that I keep on my laptop. Turns out nothing had so much as been looked at.

According to that site I linked above this exploit is something that happens on Windows computers with an issue caused by PDFs and Adobe. It is some small bit of code that hackers found a way to use to find passwords on a person's machine and then send those passwords to a site elsewhere in the world. Details of how to prevent your system being infected at in that link as well.

I use Linux primarily as my operating system and never do anything past create DVDs or some computer graphics on a windows machine, so I think that I might have lucked out slightly simply by not using Windows to ever work on The Bauble.

Long story short the site is okay and everything is just as secure as it was before.

Of course who knows how secure that is.

Blue_jester