::A Geek in Korea::

As I posted last night, there were some severe problems going on under the hood of this blog. I first ran into some errors when I tried to post something last night. I was getting some weird errors and wondered what was up. I had also noticed that the logo on my site had disappeared and wanted to know what had happened to it.

I fired up my FTP server, but I couldn’t log in no matter what I tried. ODD. I went to send an email to the administrator of this site, my friend from college that lets me share his space. No sooner had I opened my email account than I got a terrible notice. “Your account password has been compromised!”

I went on to read, in horror, about how [tag]Brazilian hackers[/tag] had set up a phishing scam on my account. It looks as though it was a scam to steal banking passwords and install keystroke loggers via viruses. I didn’t see the site, but the security person that cleaned out my account described what they were up to. It seems over 10,000 spam emails were going to be sent from my account, and I didn’t know anything about it! Luckily since the domains and ip addresses could be tracked back to Brazil, both me and the administrator could be cleared of any wrong doing.

They changed [tag]passwords[/tag] and advised me about how to set more secure passwords from now on. I took this very seriously and am in the process of upgrading all of my accounts. Mail, online services, everything. It’s such a pain, but it pays off in the long run to be more secure. Since I don’t know the point of vulnerability, I’ll have to be extra paranoid for a while. I run ample security when I boot Windows. I have spyware checking, virus checking going constantly. I’m also running Linux as my default OS now, so there is even less chance that there is something spying on me. I didn’t give my password out, so it might have simply been a brute force hack that worked.

As of now, I’ve still got more to do to secure this place. The forum will come down and be replaced. I’ve already updated to the lastest version of Wordpress (SEAMLESSLY. THANK GOODNESS. KNOCK ON WOOD.) I’m just lucky nothing appears to have had permanent damage at the moment. They had complete access. They could have deleted everything.

Learn from me. Change passwords often. Make them as [tag]secure[/tag] as possible too.