Within the last week, I received a notification from Google that visitors had reported one of my sites, www.email.tellmeaboutthat.com, was a phishing site. Google contacted me because I have Google ads on all 94 of my sites. That same day, I received a notification from my hosting provider, Host Gator, that they had detected malicious script in that same site. Host Gator’s security team took care of it for me and I went in and cleaned up the mess that the hacker had left behind.
Host Gator recommended that I change my cPanel and FTP passwords to prevent further attacks. Here’s the thing, I used a password generator that helps you create passwords that are difficult to break the code on. I say difficult because, obviously, someone was able to get in and mess with my site script. The password that I used had nothing to do with anything in my personal life. It was not made up of names of people in my life, their birth dates, anniversaries, pets names, my favorite car or anything like that. In fact it was an arbitrary set of words, numbers and symbols that I made up, in anger, after the last time I got hacked. The password generator gave me a “very strong” rating, the highest rating you can get on that particular software.
Why am I telling you this? Because I love you guys and want you to know that no matter how strong or impossible to break you think your last name and birth year password is, someone can figure it out. I learned that the bad guys use encryption software that can scan your ID’s and passwords and figure them out. This applies to your online banking, social sites such as Twitter and Face book, email access and work computers. So if you use the same password for everything, or you use passwords based on people, dates and events in your life, then change them.
This isn’t just about hackers changing web pages and causing havoc for site owners such as myself, but everything you do on line. Here are some tips from Host Gator for setting passwords:
A strong password is a password that meets the following guidelines:
- Be seven or fourteen characters long, due to the way in which encryption works. For obvious reasons, fourteen characters are preferable.
- Contain both uppercase and lowercase letters.
- Contain numbers.
- Contain symbols, such as ` ! ” ? $ ? % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { [ } ] : ; @ ‘ ~ # | \ < , > . ? /
- Contain a symbol in the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth position (due to the way in which encryption works).
- Not resemble any of your previous passwords.
- Not be your name, your friend’s or family member’s name, or your login.
- Not be a dictionary word or common name
Even if you do all of the above, a determined hacker can still get in, but if you occasionally change the password you’ll make it more difficult. Identity theft is at an all time high, so protect what is yours.
By the way, I do not allow any type of phishing from my sites nor do my sites collect cookies. I’m not interested in collecting your personal information. I only want to entertain and enlighten you.
Don’t forget to go to the links on the right and finish you Christmas shopping.
I am such a slacker!! A couple of posts back, I explained about the surgery and why I couldn’t sit here long enough to write the posts. I also said that I would do better from here on out. Well it’s actually been 10 days since I last posted.
Now, it’s not entirely my fault. As I started to make some updates to my pages and scripts, for security purposes, I noticed that there was a script error on one of my 94 web pages. With fear in my heart I started looking at other pages and, sure enough, 85 of the 94 pages had the same error.
You’ve probably noticed that I have Google ads as well as eBay and Amazon offers on most of my pages. Well that’s so I can make a few bucks to help with the cost of keeping things going. If you buy something from eBay or Amazon through my site, I make a little extra change. The same happens when you click on a Google ad and spend a few seconds reading it.
Anyway, apparently, Amazon changed something in their system which caused a bad link in the script I was using. That in turn caused an error on all 85 pages using that particular script. I contacted the guy who wrote the original script and he said it wasn’t his problem. I wrote to Amazon to try to figure out what happened and never received a response to either of my emails. I posted the problem to several forums I regularly visit, that deal with these types of problems, and heard from no one. Now I was getting worried and I started looking through the scripts trying to figure it all out.
Well, if you’ve read previous posts then you might remember that I won all my sites in an auction. They were ready made and all I had to do was enter my affiliate codes for Google, Amazon and eBay. The reason I bought them that way was because, I don’t know anything about building a web page, writing script or doing any kind of programing. So here I was thinking about just shutting it all down and forgetting about it, seriously.
Then one day while sitting here playing Half-Life, it suddenly came to me. If Amazon was like eBay then they probably had a system where an affiliate could build an ad using some kind of online wizard. In fact they did, but it was called a widget. Now when you use the widget and build the ad it automatically generates the “HTML” code for the ad. Then you copy it and paste it where you want it in the web page.
In the case of my 85 web pages, the author was thoughtful enough to put the appropriate code in a file called Amazon.php. So I start thinking that if I can replace that code with the widget generated code, everything would work fine. Well I was right and it did. However, I decided to rename the page to something besides Amazon and that meant I had to change the link in the script as well, so I did, 85 times.
Now everything is ready for you to go to each of the 85 pages and make sure they are all working correctly. You can do that by going to the right side of the page and clicking on the links under “Links”. While you are on the page, go ahead and click on some Google ads and buy some stuff from Amazon and eBay, just to make sure they are working too.
I’ll be back soon, really!!
Some of you have heard about how I won my first website in an eBay auction. I thought it was really cool that I owned a website of my very own. It was so easy, I decided to get some more and really feel important. Within a couple of months I had 94 web sites and I was really impressed with myself.
I figured I could make them even better by adding eBay auctions and Google search bars. So I joined some website advice forums and sites and began asking questions and learning something about code and placement. It started out good, but it got rather tedious when you consider I was doing it in my spare time, then multiply by 94. After that I started updating some of the articles on my sites and each site has from 10 to 40 articles in the database, depending on the site. So you can see I was and still am busy.
I write articles, regularly, to post on my blog so it doesn’t get boring for you. I also publish those articles in over one hundred article directories, one by one. By doing this I get additional visitors to my site who hopefully click on the ads and help me make a few cents. I also post to Blogger and Squidoo and some others, all in the interest of getting traffic to my site. Naturally I have to update, revise and backup on a regular basis as well and it all takes time.
Now, my goal from the beginning was to make a little cash on the side while providing information to folks like you. In order to do that I had to get accounts with Google Adsense, eBay Partnership and Amazon affiliates. Then I had to go through my 94 sites and put in the appropriate codes to make sure I got paid and not the guy who developed the sites.
What I’m getting at is this; I’ve put a lot of work into my sites. Then some jerk, I don’t even know, decides that he doesn’t like me and hacks my sites. In fact in the last four months I’ve been hacked six times. Just this past week I was hacked four times. Each time I am able to quickly recover because I’ve learned where to look for the hacked files. Additionally, I quickly contact my hosting company who scans all my files for malicious script and deletes it. Then they give me advice on how to prevent future attacks. The problem is that they only provide one piece of information at a time rather than a list of actions I should take. The one question my hosting company has never answered, even though I asked it all six times, is; How? How are the hackers getting in? Don’t they have to get into the host server? Shouldn’t my hosting company be providing some sort of security to protect my sites? I don’t know, but I’m learning some new tricks here and there that I hope will help.
From the writing on the hacked pages, I know that the people who are doing this speak Arabic. At least one has said what country he/she is from. The thing is, that other than to be mean, there is no reason to hack my sites. I don’t have any top secret information there. I don’t have anyone’s personal banking information there. I don’t even collect contact information from my visitors. I’m just trying to have a little fun and make a few pennies here and there. If they think they are going to wear me down and I’ll give up my sites, then they are nuts. Aside from all the work it takes to monitor and update 94 sites, I’m enjoying what I’m doing.
So “hackers”, go after somebody important and leave me alone. Go hack somebody that has done you harm, not me. I’m just trying to raise a family and make a living just like you.
