Chiriquí Chatter

As you can tell, Chiriquí Chatter appears to be alive and well once again. Yesterday was not a good day, in more ways than one! It took until about 9:00PM last night, for me to get everything straightened out. Most of the time was due to my lack of experience in searching for malicious code. The first time I re-installed WordPress, I put the bad code back in the new installation. It was pretty well disguised.

I am not sure how the the bad code got in, but I suspect it entered via my host’s server and potentially, there are other affected users. I could be wrong. If you visited Chiriquí Chatter, when it was infected, then the malicious code would have tried to deliver a Trojan virus to your PC. That is the reason I took CC off line.

If your Anti-Virus program didn’t notify you that malicious code was trying to be delivered to your PC, then I would double check that your OS and Anti-Virus are current and up to date. AVAST, a free AV, had no problem in recognizing and preventing the problem. I brought up Windows XP for a short time, to see the symptoms there, after being notified by a Chiriquí Chatter reader of what he was seeing. AVAST, gave me a lot of information about where the Trojan was trying to redirect traffic to.

I still have a little more work to do, but, all in all, things look pretty good. I took the opportunity to upgrade the MistyLook theme to 3.6, but I don’t think you will notice any difference. I looked at a couple new themes. I might change again one of these days. Redecorating is a part of blogging for me.

I need to reinstall my WordPress automatic backup plug-in, so that I get daily backups. I still have a lot of work to do to get all posts reflected in the Tag Cloud.

When I completed getting CC back up under the standard theme last night, I came down with the same illness that has attacked the rest of the house. I spent the next 5 hours making runs to the bathroom. My insides now are clean as a whistle. I feel a little weak, but am no longer in an emergency state of needing a close proximity to the porcelain throne.

I guess that is enough of a technical and physical update. I hope the Internet terrorists will be kept at bay for a while. Thanks again to the reader that was so helpful in diagnosing the problem and assisting me in getting CC back up.

Tags: Blog, MistyLook, WordPress