shakeelnaim » Internet

Hacked!

SuperShaka — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:24:47 +0000

Wow! This blog was hacked recently. You always read about these kind of things but never expect it to happen to you. Especially not when you’re just starting out and haven’t had much exposure in the blogosphere.
I hadn’t added anything new to the blog, so wasn’t aware of it until a friend emailed me this morning saying “Your blog’s been hacked.” (thanks Tam!).
What the hacker, or hackers, had done was replace my current theme’s index.php with their own. When a user arrived at my blog, they were greeted by a page saying “HACKED BY Red Virus” “just for fun”. If you Google “C3O@W.CN”, you can see examples of this page. They had also modified my admin password so I couldn’t log in to the admin page. I tried reseting the password but received no email.
Being at work, I couldn’t do much at the time, until I got home. Once I got home, I downloaded the entire public_html folder from the host, to try and find out exactly what had changed. Not being familiar with hacking methods and solutions this was quite a challenging task as I wasn’t sure what or where to look. I found this article which gave a few pointers. I have yet to follow all the instructions but this is what I’ve done so far to get the site back up and running.
Since I’d already identified that the theme’s index.php file had changed, I made a note of the date modified, which was 3 days ago. I then did a quick scan of the downloaded folder for any files modified in the last 7 days (as I hadn’t made any changes since February). I couldn’t see anything else but will search more thoroughly tomorrow.
I then searched online for ways of resetting Wordpress admin password and found this article. I started following the steps for resetting the password using phpMyAdmin but as soon as I looked at the wp_users table, I realised that the admin email address had been modified. I thought, before following the remaining steps in the article, I’ll update my admin email and try resetting the password again from the admin page. This worked and I got an email with link for updating my password.
After logging in to my site’s admin page, I first of all gave myself a brand new password. I then updated all plugins that had an update available and then upgraded Wordpress from 2.7 to 2.7.1.
Hopefully this will plug any security holes as a starter. Tomorrow I will follow the remaining steps outlined in Holy Shmoly!’s article. My host also has a FAQ with tips on making your Wordpress site more secure.
I’m still a bit concerned incase the hackers have left any malicious scripts hidden away in some pages somewhere deep in the site structure. If there is any malicious code, I hope the steps outlined in the article above will help me identify it.
I’m pleased to get the blog back up and running as earlier on I was concerned that I may have to delete the whole lot and start again. If anything, it’s been an experience and has focused my attention back to the blog. Hopefully I can make it more secure and then concentrate on adding new and exciting content.

Let the music play

SuperShaka — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:49:40 +0000

Spotify is a new subscription based music service, legally offering access to a vast music library.
There are 3 levels of subscription:

Free – totally free but with occasional ad
Day Pass- £0.99 for 24 hours, ad-free
Premium – £9.99 per month, unlimited ad-free

Once subscribed with Spotify, a desktop client can be downloaded, which is extremely easy to use and looks very nice. It is very similar in functionality to iTunes, relying heavily on playlists to keep your music organised. Music can be searched by artist, title, album, genre or year. Once a list of search results are returned, simply drag the desired song(s) to one of your playlists.
Music is generally of an acceptable quality with an average bit rate of 160kbps, and the range of music is quite extensive, bar a few notable exceptions, such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin.
I think one of my favourite feature is the ability to right-click on a playlist, copy the URL and then send it to a friend. When your friend clicks on the link, your playlist is automatically added to your friend’s Spotify client. What’s even more cool is that when you make any changes to your playlist, the changes are automatically reflected in your friend’s client – brilliant!
If that wasn’t enough, you can even make your shared playlist collaborative. This allows your friend to make changes to your playlist too. If you share this playlist with a bunch of friends, they can all make changes to it. How cool is that?
The radio feature is also very nice and easy to use. Simply select the decade(s) and genre and Spotify will offer you a selection of music based on your criteria.

There are some improvements I’d like to see in future updates. Perhaps some smart playlists – I think as I add more and more music, my current playlists might get difficult to manage. I’d also like to see a similar feature to the iTunes genius which would be great for discovering music you might have missed otherwise. And it goes without saying that an iPhone client would be a must-have application for any owner.
In it’s current state, I think Spotify is an excellent service and it has exposed the potential of a subscription based music service to me, whereas before I was always a bit skeptical and preferred to own all my music.
I’m not sure if I feel comfortable paying £9.99 per month for the premium service as I don’t think it offers any real advantage over the free service. The ads on the free service aren’t really that intrusive and aren’t presented that frequently, which is nice. If the premium service offered higher bit rate music and was say £7.99, then yes, I think I’d be quite happy to pay for that.
To use the free service, you must register your interest on the website and hope that you receive an invite soon. The other way is to get an invite code from an existing user. I have a handful of Spotify invitation codes available if anyone would like one. Just leave a comment (with your email) or drop me a line using the contact form.