It all happened so inconspicuously. Over the course of the past couple of months, I noticed a sudden and massive drop in the traffic to Dogmatic. It was an intense downturning spike and I shoulda known something was up then, but I just figured the readership must have tired of our content and moved on to greener pastures.
Last week, I received an email from Google informing me that they would no longer be indexing the site due to ’spam’ and other ’suspicious’ activity. Huh? Now it was all beginning to make some sense. The site had been somehow compromised.
A friend looked into it for me and he immediately found a ‘XSS attack/code injection’ into the code which was generating the spam and sending Google into a tailspin. He successfully removed the trojan but wasn’t sure how far back the exploit went.
Even if we restored the database, there could still be remnants of this thing.
What to do?
I considered shutting shop. The blog had been in existence since 2003 and maybe it was time to move on from it all. But the bottom line is, I enjoy this blog and I love updating it. Why stop it all?
Rather than scrap it all together, I felt it might be time for a reboot. With all possible trojans removed – it was time to start afresh.
So here we are. A little naked of content, but a chance to start with a clean slate.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dogmatic has risen from the ashes.
A new journey begins!
Over the last few days I was wondering what happened to the 46 odd pages, then one, then a placeholder.
Oh No! My favourite site about Melbourne has been compromised, those beautiful eery images lost to Internet gremlins.
Nice to hear the outlook is positive and pragmatic.
Your readers are still here and await the next evolution….
Good Luck HB!
Aw! Thanks for the kind words! It’s been a real hellish week, but things are looking up. Got all the old content back and I’ll be wading through that and adding it here over the course of the next few weeks. Lots to do, but the outlook is far more positive than it was a couple of days ago…
Back In Black you might say – the loyal readership here in the Scottish Highlands is still around and awaiting future posts of Dogmatisms!
I love the banner, it is way AWESOME!
I love this blog, keep it going Dogmatic boy.