My apologies to anyone who happened to wander to my site this morning and afternoon, only to discover it was unreachable. My webhost, MacHighway, had a server issue today.
It looks like everything’s finally up and running now.
It appears the cause was an exploit in a WordPress plugin that hadn’t been updated by another user on the shared server. There is a plugin that’s used by many WordPress themes and other plugins called “timthumb”. Older versions are very vulnerable to being exploited.
There is a plugin called “Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner“. If you use WordPress at all, I recommend you install, activate, and run the plugin, then take action if it finds any issues.
Until next time...
Thanks for the great PSA, Erik. I installed the scanner and it found a one instance of an outdated timthumb file in an inactive plugin and it fixed it.
Always a good reminder to keep one’s stuff updated. One never knows when some bad guy out there is trying to exploit one’s site for nefarious purposes.
Thanks for the tip! Downloaded and ran the scanner and came up clean. But considering the content of my blog, “clean” may be a misnomer.
Clean is relative. 😉