what happened
Brent Finnegan -- April 22nd, 2008
If you were wondering what happened to hburgnews.com last week, the short answer is: I was out of town (out of reach) for about ten days. During that period of time, the site froze up due to some malicious code in the database. Other contributors wanted to post, but couldn’t.
I’ve spent the better part of the day today working to fix it (with my very limited knowledge of code and FTP shuffling). I upgraded the software, but that didn’t fix it. Thanks to Jason W. (who hosts this site for free) the problem has been fixed.
P.S. The spam links in the main page code should be gone now as well. Let us know if you see anything weird.
Oh, and a big thanks to Josh for helping me diagnose the problem today.
Thanks for fixing it Brent and Josh!!! We missed it and figured that you’d never let us blog sit again!! Glad its back!
Bravo. Congrats on the technical accomplishments. I was at a loss.
Thanks for spending the day working on the site. It was missed.
Glad it’s back and working again…nothing like 10,000,000 links of garbage on a BlackBerry screen. :-)
You might try http://firewallscript.com
It would likely prevent that from happening again. It’s $85.00 though.
Glad everything is up, working, and you are back.
So what was it, the Black Japes?
Thank God Almighty! I was just about reduced to digging out Granny’s recipe for snapping turtle for that Mennonite boy over at Republitaria- he’s clueless about dressing turtle. But I have to give him credit for pulling such a big one out of Mark Obenshain’s mud-hole.
Technically the site got hacked. Someone or some program (like a spambot) exploited a security flaw in the version of WordPress we were running, and inserted a script in the program, which knocked out the ability to post.
I just got off the phone with Jason, who thinks it might have been a flawed script: the idea being that the hacker or spambot gained entry to post spam on the blog, but in doing so, accidentally killed the ability to post something.
He’s trying to figure out whether the attack was local, or if it came from a Russian spambot.
Good to know. I was starting to worry (not to mention that I missed the updates). Thanks for getting it back up and running.
have you considered gang activity as the culprit?
Yeah, why blame the Russkies when we have pre-qualified Latinos, Ragheads, and Roman Catholics as the Threat?
Brent, Josh and Jason W; thanks for getting it back up. Thanks to all the contributors who tried desperately to fix it in Brent’s absence.
Glad to know it was only a glitch.
P.S. Unfortunately, in the process, hburgnews.com has dropped from the front page of Google when searching “hburgnews.” I imagine you’ll be back up there again soon.