I’m going to take a break from Occupy posting for the moment to point out the importance of good website security. I have apparently been hosting a nasty little clickjacker for a few weeks, and only just managed to locate it yesterday. This isn’t just a me issue – there was apparently a mass deployment of the Black Hole exploit kit:

Compromised WordPress Sites Redirecting to Black Hole Exploit Kit Servers
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/compromised-wordpress-sites-redirecting-black-hole-exploit-kit-servers-110211

Apparently, I was one of them, and didn’t manage to find it all until I got my hosting in on it (though to be fair, I’ve read a few places that the infection has spread like mad on my hosting’s servers :/). I’m fairly confident that I’ve removed all signs of infection, changed all the passwords, reinstalled everything 500 times, and made sure my personal computers were clean as well. I’m only lucky that it was probably bad ftp security, rather than that AND the TimThumb vulnerability.

Anyways, this sort of stuff can hide all over the place, so I’ve attempted to compile a list of useful resources for checking your site. This is stuff you should consider doing above and beyond the usual need to stay on top of updates for plug-ins, themes, and so forth:

How to Check For Malware In Your Website or Blog?
http://www.netchunks.com/how-to-check-for-malware-in-your-website-or-blog/

This provides some good links, and some very good basic-level things you yourself can do without being too techy.  There are definitely fancier things you can do, such as:

Simple script to find base64_decode in your files
http://redleg-redleg.blogspot.com/p/simple-script-to-find-base64decode-in.html

This will actually spit out a pretty comprehensive list; I’m going to be spending the rest of the day verifying that it’s all clean-looking. So far so good, but when you have multiple WordPress installs and other things on a domain that have code to comb through, it takes time. I’m also following the advice of my hosting, and deleting all the plug-ins and themes that I’m not using. While I don’t think there are any likely problems there (seeing how the only ones I add in are generally the ones I’m using!), it’s better safe than sorry, and is just less junk in general for your site to paw through.

It’s just perfect for a Monday, right? Nevermind that this is just a continuation of my Sunday, ha ha. Here’s hoping that the rest of y’all are clear and free, but if not – here’s hoping some of this stuff will help you clear your site of infection and get back to happy.