Major virus attack on multiple Network Solutions / WordPress sites hits NJN Network hard

Whew!

Update Monday April 12th, 2001 -the only consolation after a weekend of hard work cleaning up our site is that Network Solutions had more than 100 WordPress sites hacked. Some say GoDaddy sites were hit with the same hack.

The developers from WordPress and Network Solutions engineers say they have tracked down the rogue and locked it out. We are working today to harden our site. What a crazy week that was! Back to the stories after more system admin.

Sorry again for any inconvenience to our readers.

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So I’m working on stories Thursday morning, feeling like the top of the world.

Then SLAM BAM SCHZAMM down goes the website. I bring it back up but the dirty little coward is trying to infect my computer with a Greb virus.

Imagine infected by your own website!

I called Network Solutions and they pretended it was my fault. Yeah right I posted my passwords on Kijiji as a joke.

Two emails from friends and I knew I had to act so I took the whole shebang down, went private, put up the “Under Construction” sign.

The “greb” virus was all over the main page in the source code. 

Network Solutions did that thing big companies do – they went into denial and blamed me. By nightfall, the word was out on the blogs they were having big time troubles.  At 10:45 pm they admitted it to me and I went to bed.

Today wasn’t much better. Finally at 4 pm their engineers fixed the problem and we went live again. From the sounds of it, they were pretty uptight about the attack. Only two hours later we went down when we updated all the passwords. Things are looking up now.

Saturday I’ll fix the damage and hunt around for any traces of the little bugger. Sorry for the downtime. I hope you have your virus checker up to date.

I keep two running on my computer. Norton 2010 didn’t bat an eye but Avast went into Shields Up right away. Let’s see, I paid for Norton and Avast was free.

With everyone from the US Government to Google under attack, not much is safe these days.