So, not sure if anyone is still subscribed to my blog anymore that will read this, but I think I finally fixed the hack that happened awhile back.
Many months ago, I noticed that Google had marked my site as harmful to computers. I tried a number of different things using my host tools with upgrades, plugin activations and reloads, database deletions, user deletions, etc. All of them either did nothing or broke everything. Dreamhost was fantastic in fixing my stupid mistakes, too in this process, but their online help for fixing hacked sites wasn’t all that helpful.
So, I let it sit. I still use my host as an offsite back up for music and pictures so I figured I was still getting my $10 worth/month.
1) I thought about taking it down, but I have a free domain, so what to do instead?….nothing came to mind that I had time to learn and create.
2) I thought about leaving it…..no, because it looked bad and I needed to stop having Google also flag the blog I was using to do the podcast feed for church that resides under my domain so that iTunes can see it.
3) I thought about deleting it…but no, the site has my memories of a time in my life.
Today, I thought I’d roll up my sleeves and dive in again. I did some Google searches and came up with some complex but straight-forward possibilities for solutions. I began peeking at some of the PHP files in my blog directories at the prompting of the sites.
I recalled that I wrote my own index.php file at one point in order for my blog to direct to top level domain rather than the subfolder it really is in. I decided to see if there was any hacking on there. BINGO!
It was a simple frame code in the HTML that was marked as hidden! The code was an attempt to redirect to a spam site that Google had already flagged, but (I think) because the frame was after the HTML code that directed to my blog, it never really worked but did get flagged by Google’s webcrawler.
So, I think that was it. I’ve deleted the code and submitted a request to Google to reconsider my site. I should know in about a week!
