Title page installed in my WordPress blog by a hacker

It’s every webmaster’s or blogger’s nightmare to visit your website to find it has been hacked. A few of my own WordPress blogs were recently hacked. Including this one. On a recent visit after a short absense I immediately discovered the home page was changed along with my username and password used to login the admin panel.

I was shocked when I first visited this very website. Instead of the usual homepage displaying recent posts and the usual stuff, I instead was faced with a black page with red and yellow Arabic writing according to Google Translate.

However there is no need to worry. There is a procedure to fix the password that I found at the Official WordPress Support Forums.

As I have access to the webhosting account for my hacked domains, after some research and investigation, I found it very simple to get my website back to normal.

In this instance the hacker had only changed a few specific things in my WordPress accounts. The items changed were the index.php file to display the Hacker’s message, my username, password and email address. So here is what I had to do.

1. In my hosting account I eneterd Cpanel to access the MySQL database for the WordPress blog via the phpMyAdmin utility.
2. Select the WordPress database username.
3. Select the “users” table from the list of tables. I could see my details had been changed for my user record.
4. Press the Edit icon (pencil) of the user record that has to be ammended.
5. I had to change my user_login, user_pass, user_nicename, user_email, and display_name. NB. When changing the user_pass make sure you select MD5 in the Function drop down list.
6. Press Go to save the ammended table, and exit phpMyAdmin. The user_pass will be encrypted and show as a bunch of Alphanumeric characters and symbols.
7. Test the Username and Password by logging into the WordPress user inetrface.
8. The only other file that was changed was the index.php file for the Theme I was using. So in the WordPress dashboard go to Appearance, Editor. Select index.php – I could see how the hacker had replaced the Theme’s Index Page with their own. Delete the code from the hacker, and copy and paste the correct index.php code for the Theme. Download the Theme again if you don’t have a copy of the original Theme on your hard drive.
9. Then I checked my website and all was back to normal again.

I was lucky that only one file for the Theme had been changed. It is worth the effort to make sure no other files have been changed. One way to do this is to compare the exact file size of your installed Theme against the copy on your hard drive. The easiest way to do this would be with a FTP program like WS_FTP. Then just compare files between your Local computer and the Remote site all on the one screen.

And that’s all there is to it.

If there is anything else to add or be aware of when your WordPress blog is hacked please leave a comment below.

Google is indexing new content in seconds

A couple of days ago I was adding some new posts to a brand new fashion blog, when I got the shock of my life. I noticed when I put the domain of my new post into Google Search it was getting indexed very very quickly. As I had quite a few new blog posts to add to this new site I kept checking how quickly Google was indexing my new posts. So as soon as I published a new post I went straight to Google to see if it was there. every time I checked the new post was indexed. In fact found that within 10 seconds or less my post was being indexed.

The method I use for checking whether my post was being indexed was entering into Google search, site: mydomain.com.

The next thing I wanted to test was whether these new posts were getting ranked. So it seems it is very easy to get webpages indexed into Google, however it may be another thing to get them ranked. So what I did was take the headline of my new blog post and into that into Google search. To my surprise each post would be ranked against my competition for that headline. Keep in mind my headlines were 5 to 8 words long and would be considered long tail keywords. Nonetheless they were being indexed anywhere from position four two page 10.

Now you may be thinking that my fashion blog may have already had Google Page Rank and lots of back links. Well this may surprise you. I registered that domain just over a year ago, installed WordPress, and just forgot about it. So for 12 months it sat on my hosting account with the standard WordPress post and comment and that’s it. Somehow Google had managed to find it and only the homepage was indexed. It had zero back links when I checked in Yahoo.

So it is truly amazing that a brand new WordPress blog can be indexed and ranked within seconds. This is happening at a time when this week Google have announced that they are providing instantaneous search results. They are saying that as soon as you type new content it will appear in their search index.

A new experiencing the same results? Please let me know by posting a comment below.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/fighting-fraud-online-taking-google.html

It’s important to thoroughly check the product, service or company you are promoting.

Here’s some names you might be familiar with that are in Google’s bad books:

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.
Source: The Official Google Blog

Another interesting article from Google Adwords Support about disabled accounts:

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

Specifically what Google doesn’t like include:

* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
* Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
* “Get-rich quick” sites
* Malware sites that install software on a visitor’s computer
* Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other shopping/travel comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality
Source: Google Adwords Support

In addition to this it is important that all internet marketers promoting their own products or products of others in the United States become familiar with the FTC’s guidelines for advertising.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/guides.shtm

In short Google and the FTC are making us internet marketers aware of our responsibilities, whether you like it or not, and ensure that any products or services you promote don’t infringe trademarks or copyrights, are not scams, and will not provide your website visitors with a poor or harmful user experience. That means do your due diligence first and check out any company and their products or services before you decide to promote them to others.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any other information to add to this.

The popular font used online for good readibility is the Arial family of fonts. And that is what I wanted to be used on this blog.

Remedy please? Well it ended up being easy to change. Now the Cutline Theme does not have any easy to use interface to change parameters like text styles as some more recent themes. However I could get access to the css stylesheet to edit the fonts.

I am not a css expert by a long shot. But when you look at any stylesheet it is easy to find and change any parameter in WordPress’ Appearance, Editor. By the way I’m using WordPress version 2.8 at the time of writing.

So first step was to find any font attributes in the stylesheet. Thats easy with my FireFox browser. I just hit Ctrl+F and enter “font”.

What I found as the default font family was:

font: 62.5% Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;

Each time I found this text I replaced it with:

font: 62.5% Arial, Helvetica, Geneva;

Notice that I kept the 62.5% resizing attribute as I found it. I also got to sort out the double spacing between lines.

Now my blog is far easier to read. Don’t you think?

I chose it because it not only post my latest Twitter updates in the sidebar, but I can also submit my Tweet from the sidebar, or Tweet a new blog post. This WordPress plugin is easily activated by adding the Twitter Tools widget to my sidebar, and updating the settings page.

This is my first test of trying to Tweet a blog post. So fingers crossed it works. Let’s see.