So I haven’t written a post in awhile. A big reason is that I’ve been busy having fun since moving to Seattle. Lots of new friends and lots of new things to do. There’s another reason though. My webhost was hacked.
A few months ago, I tried to log in to my WordPress blog to look at my site stats. I was greeted with a PHP error about headers being sent. I kind of thought it was some sort of WordPress.com integration that was causing the issue and I ignored it. I checked again awhile later and still saw the problem. After Googling around a bit, I saw some useful looking posts about what to do with that error.
Basically, the problem was some malformed PHP on the page. I wondered how this could have happened, since I never update any of the WordPress files myself. Then I went to the file that was throwing the error. There was some PHP code inserted that wrote out some wonderful advertising code. I never put it in there. My account must have been hacked somehow. I try to keep my WordPress install up to date to prevent these things from happening so I was a little surprised that it happened.
So I started looking around at other files and noticed that index.html had some shenanigans going on in it. Since this isn’t a part of my WordPress install, it led me to believe that maybe it was my GoDaddy hosting account (yeah, yeah, I know). So I searched found lots of complaints of a GoDaddy WordPress hack in January of this year.
So that’s what happened.