Virus Day!

As some of you may have noticed over the last few days, we’ve had a major malware infection. This wasn’t actually our fault so much. What happened is a third party plugin that we use was hacked (not just on our site – on every single site that uses wp-polls). Basically, it exploits the code that we use to put polls on our site and instead of referencing our poll it references a trojan or virus. They have since released an update but we have removed the plugin for now in order to ensure no further problems arise.

We identified it quickly because literally, within about 15 minutes of Google highlighting our site as malicious and stopping people from visiting us, we had over 50 emails/tweets/Facebook messages alerting us to what had happened! This amazes me and humbles me at the same time. Although I check our hit counts every day (they pretty much always range between 1000 and 1400 unique hits per day) – when you are working on a site such as Fantasy-Faction, you never really know whether people really care that it is up here…would it really matter if it was gone?

That’s just what the Internet is like I guess. As much as it is great to be retweeted and have people message you on Twitter, we only actually hear from a very, very small percentage of people who use the site. What was fantastic was to get messages of fans and authors, even publishers freaking out that Fantasy-Faction was possibly gone and not coming back! As much as I was sorry to see people panic, it was great to see that they cared and I can’t thank those who message us enough for their good wishes, help and advice in fixing things. For example:

Spammers got no souls. they only want money by destroying others. they deserve no mercy.

Just wanted to send you guys momentum. My sympathies to you guys over the website attack.

A community as strong as ours can take any punishment from spammers. We are unwavering. We are steel.

don’t let the gits get you down. Keep on doing a great job. You are making a lot of people happy.

The thing that hurt the most for me was how it affected our hit count. As people know, we are not for profit and therefore we make no money from Fantasy-Faction (not a single penny!). We do it purely for the knowledge that a lot of people are reading what we put out there. Let me share the following with you:

Of course I freaked out as much as the rest of you when we saw this and quickly we went about contacting Google in order to get removed from the “naughty list”. Obviously we needed first to fix things, which was a real pain because the plugin had posted the bad code into a lot of our pages. For most people with virus scanners and firewalls, this wouldn’t pose a problem, but for those who didn’t they may have experienced pop-ups and files trying to download…quite scary stuff. We really, really didn’t want to lose all our web-content and therefore we had to go through every page and delete the code. It took probably 14 hours of work, but I am glad to show you the following:

Well, we are back now and we will continue to keep pushing forward. I am sure it will take a few days to build people’s trust in us back up, but rest assured we are ready to earn it with some fantastic articles. Next step is squashing the forum spammers!

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