Thursday, November 10, 2011

Frazzled nerves

What a day! Last night, Google put a big red warning sign on the blog; it had been infected with malware. I've spent the night and all day today, trying to find and eradicate the source of the problem. I think I must have got it, because Google now says they do not detect any malware. (Big sigh of relief!)

A hawk named Google? (Vacant lot, this summer)

In the process, however, I deleted several widgets, most of my blogroll, most of the blogs I follow, all my followers, and a few links in specific posts. Somewhere in all of it, the deceptive link got removed; I stopped deleting then, but I'd lost most of the blogs I love to read. I'll re-load the blogroll, with the few links I still have.

Could I ask you a favour? If you don't show up on the blogroll, and you know you should, could you please drop me a line here in the comments, or by e-mail (wanderinweeta at gmail dot com)? Thanks!

I've enabled moderation for comments for now. Sorry about that, but I just want to insure against re-infection. I'll figure out how to killfile the offender as soon as I can, and then I can go back to normal.

Sad remains.

I should be thanking Google, too. I would hate to have gone on merrily handing out copies of whatever bug I'd contracted. Thanks for warning me, Google! And thanks to you people for your screen shots and suggestions.

 Now, off to install widgets again ...




7 comments:

  1. Susannah: oh, my goodness what a scary thing to happen. I didn't even realize that could happen, which certain says more about my (lack of) level of technical ability than anything else.

    I hope you're fixed, too.

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  2. I so understand. Somewhere last month my system went south on me. My fix was not so easy but there was obviously some incompatablilty with IE9 and Blogger and Flickr, so photos were impossible.

    I am security covered to the max so if I have picked up anything recent I would not know.

    And now with the weather changing, it will be hard to go out and enjoy a sunny walk.

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  3. Bummer. These spammers are swine. One trick I learned is to close open commenting on any post more than a month old. For some reason, spammers like old posts. BTW, my blog Stones and Bones has had a ton of visits from you, and I hope you can link it again.
    http://stonesnbones.blogspot.com/

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  4. How very frustrating and scary. My Google got hijacked a couple of months ago, and only a complete wipe and restore cured it. I have found two things that help - one is installing a pop-up blocker and the other is spyware removal (I use Spybot Search & Destroy - a free download that works great).

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  5. Oh yuck, Susannah, what a horrible thing to have happen. You must feel really violated. I'm glad to hear you've fixed almost everything now.

    I hope you stop by my blog, The Contented Naturalist, again sometime; I haven't posted much recently (swamped with schoolwork) but look forward to starting back up after finals. I was honored to be featured in Circus of the Spineless #66 too.

    --Jodi
    http://contentednaturalist.blogspot.com

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  6. I am so glad you are back up and running. I'm not sure I would know how to track down a problem like that to get it fixed. - Margy

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I'm having to moderate all comments because Blogger seems to have a problem notifying me. Sorry about that. I will review them several times daily, though, until this issue is fixed.

Also, I have word verification on, because I found out that not only do I get spam without it, but it gets passed on to anyone commenting in that thread. Not cool!

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