The Cottage Smallholder


stumbling self sufficiency in a small space

Hackers, spam and a glimpse of our garden

garden June 2008We’ve had major problems with the Cottage Smallholder website.

Over the past ten days we’ve been 24/7 at the rock face with just enough time to write a post and then rushing back to try and sort out the problems. No time to visit other blogs or even keep up to date with comments on this site. Many apologies.

Hackers had managed to gnaw their way in, insertng extra paragraphs packed with links on some of my posts. Luckily this somehow disabled comments on the affected posts. We were bemused and finally discovered the rogue comments when we viewed the posts in html format.

We quickly deleted their additions but they kept on coming back.

Since then Danny has been beavering away, backing up the site, blocking up loopholes and installing the latest upgrades of the software that we use. Both of us have been searching for invaders. Last night we discovered they had infiltrated the day’s post and the next one that was waiting in the wings to go up. I finally lost it and burst into tears.

D grabbed his virtual toolkit – the special one with increased voompf. Today we reckon that D has cracked it and think that we are now finally secure.

We have a spam filter installed on the site and this catches an average of 80 spam comments a day. I’ve habitually cleaned out the filter daily. We prefer not to just delete them unseen as one in a hundred is a genuine comment. The checking operation can take twenty minutes or so. The majority of the spam is promoting porn or pharmaceutical sites, or both.
“If you take this you can have more of that . . .”
It’s tawdry and depressing and, without the spam filter, I would have lost heart and given up blogging months ago like so many boggers have done in the past.

Spam – ghastly when it referred to cheap tinned pink meat that was served with school dinners in the sixties. Now a different sort of nightmare.

Give me the canned stuff any day. I’d eat it regularly if it meant that it didn’t have to go through the spam and hacker attacks.

Hackers?

  • Remember to back up your site regularly (we didn’t – just too big. We’ve done it now).
  • Keep your eyes peeled for anything unusual (we did).
  • Upgrade your software each time a new release is issued. (we didn’t – too much hassle. Now we’ll upgrade every time).

If you do the last two hackers probably won’t target you as each upgrade tackles new security issues and we have discovered that they target sites that are using old software versions with known ‘holes’.

If hackers do squirm their way in and you have backed up regularly, you will be able to get back on the scene in hours rather than days.


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13 Comments

  1. Fiona Nevile

    Hi Pat

    If these people managed to infiltrate the posts on the blog they can get higher Google listings but once Google discovers that your blog has been infiltrated they often stop listing your site until the problem is sorted out.

    Thank goodness the latter didn’t happen to us!

    Hi Sally

    I’m very much the show has to go on mentality.

    Hi Pamela

    It’s sad that the porn and pharmaceutical sites feel that they have to bombard everyone with their wares. Children must think that the average adult mind is very strange.

    Hi Joanna

    We have found that WordPress is excellent. The software is free, although you have to pay for hosting on WordPress (ours is hosted elsewhere). There are lots of useful plugins and the support forums are excellent. You can also backup your site from the dashboard (admin panel). We have only just got this running and until then have backed up (very intermittently) from the server. Danny had to back up the databases one by one which was laborious.

    There is a very neat piece of software (Shortstats) which analyses your visitors and records the feeds that are taken from the site. (Google Analatics just records visits, not feeds). However this can quickly become unwieldy as it records details of every hit as well as every visit (out of 4000 visits you may have 18,000 hits). Backing this up can be a problem.

    I’ve found that using some of the WordPress plugins does require a certain degree of techy knowledge but generally you can get the help that you need on the forums.

    The thing about Blogger is that most of the sites look so similar. WordPress has millions of free ‘themes’ available which can be customised quite easily.

    Why not set up a WordPress test blog, if you have some available webspace and play with it before making any permanent switch.

    Hi Jo

    Ah yes, the spam sketch. A classic – I’d forgotten all about it. Just thinking about it has made me giggle!

    Great advice re sitting in the garden. It’s so easy to get caught up in the drama and not appreciate the moment. Thank you.

    Hi Magic Cochin

    I think that everything is watertight now!

    Hi Nommo

    Yes we use Akismet and find it excellent. I hadn’t heard of Bad Behaviour and will definitely check it out. Thanks so much for the tip.

    I also had a brief look at Websitegrader.com – a very handy resource. Thanks so much for your help.

    Best of luck with your vegetables!

    Hello Caroline

    Many thanks for your commiserations. Much appreciated.

  2. Caroline

    gosh how horrible. hope it’s all sorted now though. why people get pleasure out of doing that kind of thing i don’t know.
    best wishes
    Caroline

  3. Hiya,

    I have been lurking and reading your posts for a while (although I missed the spam affected posts) – I thought I would chip in at this point as I ‘do ‘wordpress for a living these days (and veg growing when I tear myself away from the PC!).

    I use ‘aksimet’ (no doubt you are using that, it comes pre-installed) and ‘bad behaviour‘ as second line of defence, along with authorising every single comment manually on my boss’s blog in order to prevent spammers and hackers. I am still running WordPress 2.3.3 for that blog though. I still try to keep my plugins up to date – hopefully your updates have helped.

    Bad behaviour is a really powerful plugin – it can interfere with some automated webservices (like www.websitegrader.com), but it pretty much stops spammers and crackers in their tracks, especially if akismet doesn’t stop it first. I reckon you could probably run it on a blog and allow instant anonymous posting… hmm – I might try that as an experiment on my own blog.

    Keep up the good work anyway – don’t let the spammers get you down! Let me know if you want any more WordPress tips…

  4. magic cochin

    What a blinking nightmare Fiona! Hope you get things back under control again soon.

    All the best
    Celia

  5. Jo @ LittleFfarm Dairy

    P.S. Having had that glimpse of your garden…..

    Hope that it’s been as lovely over there with you as it has been here in our little valley, today. I suggest you follow our de-stressing pattern for the evening:

    After finishing the chores, just as the sun’s setting, take a candle, a couple of glasses & a decent bottle of wine & sit on that lovely bench, & just live in the moment, relax, & truly enjoy & appreciate where you are…..for no matter what, those hackers can’t take that away from you; nor do they have that themselves.

    Revel in the fact that you actually have a life, where you can enjoy such simple, delicious pleasures – whilst they’re probably holed up in some sad, grubby little bedsit attempting to make your life a misery, just because theirs is so pathetic; & they’re jealous, desperate “anoraks” with (tragically) nothing better to do. Thus raise your glass; & feel sorry for them….poor, sad, whazzits.

    And relax, & enjoy the moment….it’s yours.

  6. Jo @ LittleFfarm Dairy

    Looks like it really has been Friday 13th for you in blogging terms…..so very sorry to hear it.

    Alas, I’ve been too busy to blog of late but thankfully have been left alone by the dreaded Horrible Hackers….but what with kidding the goats, shearing the sheep & working on exhausting product trials it’s been non-stop: & now our Broody has eleven hungry Silkie X mouths to feed -& thus the whirl continues!

    I suggest that to cheer yourself up you watch Monty Python’s “Spam” sketch – that’ll have you in tears of hysterical laughter although whether bordering on the barking mad owing to those hacking scumbags, who can say……hope someone puts a worm where it hurst them too so they know what it feels like to have something so very important, hurt in a moment’s petty tampering.

    Anyway – keep smiling, matie; you always bring a ray of sunshine here to our Ffarm’s unending travails.

  7. Joanna

    Fiona I am SO sorry to read all this, and agree with everything your three commenters say. I don’t use WordPress, although I am considering switching from Blogger. Is WordPress helpful here? Or did most of your help come from your ISP? AND, how have you backed up your blog? I’ve never found a satisfactory way, although I’ve tried a couple

    Joanna

  8. Pamela

    I can’t understand why these people feel the need to send the spam out. If you want to find pornography or pharmaceuticals on the internet it’s out there and easy to find. So if you are not looking it is because you are just not interested. It is bad enough to come across unwanted stuff when you thought you were looking for something else. My now 9 year old niece typed my name in and did a search a couple of years ago and suddenly had all kinds of stuff relating to Pamela Anderson on screen. Fortunately her mum was there and got rid of it.

  9. What a horrible experience for you. I had no idea all this was going on behind the scene. Front of house it looked like business as usual.

  10. Thanks for the warning Fiona. I really don’t understand what pleasure these folks get out of doing this sort of thing. They must leave such dull lives that all they can do is take pleasure out of spaming others.

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