Recently, there have been a few things that happened on TechieLobang website. It is not known to the readers but it really affects how the blog progress.

First of all, on 11th April 2011, my website was suspected of being hacked.

Thanks to Google Webmasters, I am being informed (plus a friend of mine who noticed that when he searched for my site, it shows “This site may be compromised”).

At first, I thought nothing about it, thinking that it was a false alarm. I got my HostGator to check and they found no viruses on the site. Finally, I managed to see the “results” of the hack on my FTP.

Many files and folders were created inside my site. These files act as a redirect to other sites (hundreds of them). I managed to clear them out and requested Google to reconsider my status.

Here is a screenshot of the folders that was inserted into my Public HTML folder

And here are samples of the files inside one of the folders.

These files copied all the HTML content of the index file and change the main content to some other unrelated information. BTW, this is the files in the Public HTML folder and NOT related to the blog folders.

And most important part of the hack is the information below.

I did a search on 213.5.68.141 and found that many sites were hacked on 27 or 28 March 2011. Similarly, their .htacess were downloaded and uploaded again. Thanks to HostGator for doing a cleanup for me.

I did a trace on the IP and it leads to Netherlands with ISP: AltusHost. I doubt they will know anything but just for everyone who happen to visit here.

It took a few days for my status to become normal again. However, the indexes that Google has done on my site are almost gone. I could not find my posts on Google directly.

This created an impact on my Google Custom Search that I had on my blog. Therefore, I reverted back to the standard blog search at this moment.

Actually, 2 days before the attack, my blog was “down” for an hour or two. Thanks to HostGator Live Chat service, I managed to pinpoint the reason. It was due to high CPU usage and HostGator had to temporary suspend my site.

I guess it might be at that time when I was hacked. Anyway, I changed my password immediately and monitor almost daily.

Today, I decided to do another change. This change will allow readers to interact more with the blog. I noticed that sometimes when I made a post, readers might notice some issues or something wrong with my posting or would like to comment. Previously, when they comment on it, I will only get to know when I check the email.

Now with Disqus Comment Systems, readers will have many choices (Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, OpenID) to login to the comment system.

Once you logged in, readers can post their comment and select if you want to share it on Twitter or Facebook or not. With Twitter, you can @joeteh so that I will know almost immediately on the comment. This will be much faster and more interactive.

And you can also like the Page and/or share with others.

In this way, I find that the blog will be more interactive. My aim is to discuss topics that readers find to be interesting. Hopefully, it will work out well.

I am in the midst of transferring all comments from WordPress to Disqus. In the meanwhile, please continue to comment.

And to end this post, I have to thanks readers, subscribers for the patience. Finally the Fanpage has more than 200 fans. To many, it might not be a great achievement but to me, I sincerely thanks everyone for the trust given.

Thank YOU!

Regards,
Joe