PhotoWalkPro

photo by chego101

You may have noticed that my blog has been the target of MalWare (Malicious Software) hacks as of late. The thing is that it’s not just my blog that has been attacked, but numerous blogs and websites spread out across different genres. The hacks have not actually added any spam or malware to the sites, rather they redirect your browser to another site that is hosting the malware.

Often times, your browser will alert you to the presence of a re-direct and put up a warning screen that won’t let you proceed without first agreeing.  Sometimes though, it will slip by and you will end up visiting the “bad” site.  So here’s what you should be doing to protect yourself.

First, make sure that you are running up to date virus software.  Even though these are not technically viruses, they can sometimes be stopped by a good virus software.  Run a malware/spyware checker on your computer and have it monitor every now and then.  I use Spybot Search and Destroy on my Windows machine and it does a fantastic job.  It’s also free so the price is right (although they do accept donations).

If you visit a site and see that it is trying to re-direct you to a different site, close your browser window and don’t wait for it to finish.  Here’s the deal though, I have several domain names that all point to this blog. There’s photowalkpro.com, jeffrevell.com, revellphotography.com/blog, all ending up here at this very spot so if you type in www.photowalkpro.com and notice that your browser is pointing to revellphotography/blog, don’t be alarmed.  It’s supposed to do that.  But, if you see my blog page come up and then it goes away and some other site is starting to load, that’s when it’s time to pull the plug.

Finally, if you do get a re-direct, you should run your virus and malware software first, just to make sure nothing bad has happened.  After that, you should try and contact the site owner, me in this case, and let them know that there is a problem.  Many times the owner of the site won’t know they have been hacked for several days, especially if they don’t update their content on a daily basis. If you don’t know the email address to report the problem you can often times contact via Twitter or Facebook.

You can get ahold of me be emailing admin(@)photowalkpro.com (remove the parenthesis around the @ symbol first) or send a message to @photowalkpro on Twitter, or leave a message on my Facebook fanpage

I want you to know that I try very hard to keep this site clean so that you are protected. Hopefully my hosting provider (GoDaddy) will be able to fix the security problems and this type of thing will just be an unpleasant memory from the past.

Related posts:

1. Back in Business…For the Most Part
2. Hacked Again
3. Blog Problems Fixed

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Blog Stuff, Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.