hainesnews

CAUTION: I just tried to send an email and my virus software (Vipre) detected a virus — this has not happened before (the computer is 4 months old.)

I’m guessing the FTP backup I made early in this process could have brought a virus aboard.

Cleaning, cleaning…

esmi —

Thanks for all of your help and patience.

wolfteam: check first with your hosting service…

I’ve called GoDaddy tech support and they are helpful in this circumstance, but they won’t be able to fix any of my files, database or rebuild any part of my site — that’s my job.

I’ve asked them for a detailed log of activity around the date JohnDillinger1903 signed in, hoping that will give me some clues to what else he did–they need 24 hours. Once GoDaddy is done, the whole site comes down and will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Obviously, esmi has been through this many times with other users because the reference URLs she gave have a huge amount of helpful information.

Hopefully I can be back on line in a couple of days, but I’m not much of a “techie,” so it looks like I’ll be studying and tinkering for weeks before I can be confident of a clean & hardened site.

It looks like I have some studying to do. FYI the unknown user logged on as MisterX56712, and gave an email address as [email protected]. A quick google search reveals several complaints of hacked blogs using this email address.

Meanwhile, my site has gone off-line for unknown reasons. I’m working with the hosting company on putting together more data.

Anyone know where this guy lives?

It looks like I’ve been hacked — the database shows a new and unknown user was registered on 4/8/2010. Suggestions?

I will, however he rarely logs on — it’s more likely that I hit a wrong key while tweaking the site users — providing that’s the problem. Thanks for the suggestion.

I don’t see an indication of status on my profile page. Normally, as administrator I should be able to edit users — a menu choice that is not available. I can see a couple of places to go from here:

1. I have one author who I upgraded to admin status while I was out of town — he may be able to check/change my status through the Dashboard.

2. If I can figure out how to view/edit the database for my site, I may be able to change my status there. I expect the hosting company may be able to assist with instructions…

Any suggestions, instruction or ideas?

Just a thought — since everything else appears to function properly, could I have somehow lost my Admin privileges, thus making certain changes to the website unavailable?

Maybe it’s time to uninstall WordPress and rebuild the site from scratch? I’m assuming that with an FTP backup I can do this without losing all of my data…

My bad…out of curiosity, I went back and unzipped a fresh copy of 2.9.2 from yesterday’s download. It appears left.php and sidebar.php do not belong in the themes directory, but in an individual theme file. So it appears I accidentally copied a couple of files out of the alibi3col directory into the parent directory. That is fixed.

The Dashboard problem remains the same.

Yes, I do. And the files in the default folder match those with the clean copy of WP 2.9.2 that I downloaded yesterday.

Interestingly, I just found one file in the themes folder that has a different file size on the server: left.php is 1,042 bytes in the downloaded version (local), and only 928 bytes on the server. I tried sending the newer (local) file to the server and it did not appear to over-write the server version as directed. Then I deleted the one on the server and uploaded the newer (local) file, but it still shows the smaller file size. When I compare the files visually in my editor, I see no difference. I’m using FileZilla for an FTP program.

No dice … I renamed alibi3col and the public gets only a white screen. When I change the name back to alibi3col then the site is visible again, with no changes. In either case the dashboard remains the same — with the same menu choices missing.

I’m guessing that might rule out the theme as the source of the problem?

Okay…

I have re-uploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders from a fresh download of WordPress.

I have perused all of the files and removed the sitemeter script. I was unable to find the paypal html code which is imbedded in a widget at the bottom of the left column.

Having use of neither the Dashboard, nor a good understanding of PHP and CSS coding, I was unable to switch to the default theme. Perhaps you could tell me how to do this? If not — any other suggestions?

(So far, the dashboard has not changed)

Wow. Thanks for the quick response.

1. I have deleted all plugins from the plugins directory under the admin folder using FTP (is this what you mean by “resetting the plugins folder?”)
2. I’m hoping 16 Gb is enough memory.

…and I’m headed in to take care of the other stuff now.