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What to do about Reported Attack Site message

Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 by momscashblog | 30 Comments so far

Last week I had a Malware Virus to deal with,  so upon visiting my site you may have seen the blog but also gotten a warning to stay away from this site or you could get a virus. (Don’t worry, it’s very safe!) For those of you with certain virus protection you did not see my blog. In it’s place was a red warning page titled “Reported Attack Site” and a paragraph saying this site was under attack… which is how I found out I had a virus on my own blog! I thought “well, I’ll just go to my WordPress and see what’s up. (Duh!) My site was taken down so there was no WordPress to go to.  Also my webmail was taken down, and my blog’s name and domain was removed from all search engines. I’m told that if my blog did get into the search engines it would have had a warning saying not to come to my site. Ouch! But with the help of Hostgator, GoogleWebmasterTools, and Lloyd Lopez, I got through the malware attack pretty much unscathed. I didn’t lose anything and in the end, it was much less traumatic than I expected. Of course, when it first happened I was stressed, but so far, so good.

The message “Reported Attack Site” is a little confusing to me. I’m thinking maybe they should say “Report an Attack to Google” because that is what you have to do. Google detects the malware virus and shuts the site down to prevent it from going any further and protect anyone visiting the infected site. It is then your responsibility to get it fixed and send a report to Google. When it finally gets a clean bill of health they will put your site back up.

I found out that many new bloggers just abandon their blogs when they find the “Reported Attack Site” message because they don’t know what to do about it.Malware virus/hacking is something that all bloggers could encounter, so I will pass on the process that I went through to get my blog back up and running. Keep in mind that there are many different types of hacking and viruses, but mine was a malware virus. To learn more about malware viruses and how to protect your blog, go to WordPress.

1. Call your blog hosting company. Whenever your blog goes down you should call or e-mail the company who hosts your blog. I’d much rather call than send an e-mail because I like instant feedback, so make sure you have the telephone number(s) of your blog host in a notebook ready for these occasions. I use HostGator for this blog and they’re also the host for the MCB Free Blog Tutorial.  I cannot say enough good things about them. They are patient, very helpful and easy to talk to for a non-techie like me.

1a. Send e-mail to host security requesting help. HostGator told me I had a Malware Virus and that I had to send an e-mail to HostGator Security to request help and tell them of the warning Google placed on my blog. Security immediately sent notification that they received my request and gave me a case number for the process.

(Of course, you could skip the initial call  [1] and just send an e-mail to Security [1a], but I’ve always communicated better through phone… or face to face… and the call was very informative and reassuring.)

2. Wait for notification from host security. It took a while but I finally got an e-mail saying that HostGator assessed my blog and I indeed had been hacked with malware. They told me I was hacked into from  WordPress versions that had not been updated, and that my site was now clean.

Problem Solved! (Just kidding!) Now you have to notify Google and wait for Google to approve you.

2a. Report to your Google Webmaster Tools. HostGator told me I now had to let Google know that my site had been cleaned of all badware, so I did.  I then checked off the box saying “Please review my blog”..

3. Let Google review blog. I assumed I was in the clear, but Google informed me that they were still detecting “badware” on my site. So I called HostGator and they fixed each problem as Google told us of them. In my case this whole thing took about 3 days before my site was declared “cleaned of badware” .

3a. Wait for OK from Google. I checked my mail constantly and on the third day I was finally got the message: “Status of the lastest badware review for this site. A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean the badware warning from web search are being removed. Please note that it can take some time for the change to propagate.”

Keep checking to see if blog has propogated and you should be up and running when you see your blog online!!

Since my older version of hacked  WordPress was hacked into, I had to change my passwords (for Cpanel and admin. log- in too) and make them very strong and I will be changing them often. If you haven’t started a blog yet, make sure you have a notebook or two to hold all of your many passwords, telephone numbers, and dates of expiration for your domain name, blog host, etc.

To decrease the changes of being hacked make sure you have very strong passwords with numbers and symbols mixed in and change those passwords often! If there is anyone who has had this happened to them or can share more information on this type of problem and/or  would like to share in comments section or interested in a guest post please leave a comment.


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The Hacking of Taylor Blue

Posted Thursday, September 4, 2008 by momscashblog | 19 Comments so far

Bloggers come and go, but when Taylor Blue went missing, I could feel that something was wrong! After I bought MomsCashBlog, Taylor Blue was a frequent commenter and she welcomed me with open arms and encouraging words from my very first post. I considered her a good blogging friend and of course I went to her site, taylorsentertainmentnews.com and I was hooked on it from the very first visit. She had a great entertainment gossip blog that was laid out beautifully with pictures of entertainers and the music industry, interesting stories, great ads, and it was updated constantly… sometimes even 4 or 5 times a day! (Wow, that’s dedication!) I went to it ALL the time to get my daily or weekly dose of entertainment gossip. Then one day, it was gone! I tried again and again and again and still could not find it. Althought it took me a while to find her (no site… no e-mail), I kept at it and I finally found another wonderful entertainment site that I liked a lot and something told me to e-mailed the admin and ask if she knew anything about Taylor Blue’s site. The Admin of TEN Gossip.com told me she WAS Taylor Blue, and she told me what happened to her taylorsentertainment blog. It was actually a horror story for bloggers because Taylor Blue’s wonderful blog that she put so much work into, had been hacked!

After a few e-mails back and forth, I asked if she would mind sharing her story with us on MomsCashBlog or if she’d rather just forget the whole experience.  She wrote back and said “YES,  I would love for people to know what happened and maybe they can prevent it from happening to their blog.” So I asked Taylor Blue a few questions thru e-mail about her hacking experience… a blogger’s nightmare! (more…)


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Weekend Website!

Posted Saturday, May 24, 2008 by momscashblog | 16 Comments so far

You’ve got 3 days off, so why don’t you put up your website NOW.  Just use MomsCashBlog’s Free Blog Tutorial and you can have your own website up and ready to go before the weekend is done. It won’t even use up the whole weekend because some say the tutorial takes less than an hour!! (not counting the waiting period for set up….which is ” break time”.) You can do it yourself with the easy step-by-step instructions.

Take a look at the  Blog Tutorial and make some decisions of about what you want to name your website. You can even play around and put some names in at Step One to make up names and see if YOUR web domain name is available.  There are a lot of websites out there so the availability of good names is getting scarce. It’s a good idea to register your domain name NOW! If you don’t have time to finish the whole tutorial in one sitting, you should at least choose your domain name and buy it before someone else gets to it first. Later, when you have more time, you can come back to the tutorial and continue with Step Two and then on to Step Three…and BAM!!…you’ve got your own website registered on the internet! Easy as One, Two, Three!

But the tutorial doesn’t stop there! Steps Four and Five  get you going on WordPress, the most widely used blogging/website program on the internet. The Blog Tutorial continues to instruct you on how to set your site up, choose a theme (the look and design), post article, and make space for your ads and widgets!

Remember, with this tutorial you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start the process today and come back to it whenever you choose. Use the whole weekend to leisurely set up your site….take a day, take just half a day, or you can even do it in an hour, if you’re fast  on the keyboard.

Fast or Slow…Do it at Your own pace! And once you have your own blog or website, that’s when the fun begins. Come back to MomsCashBlog and you can even make some extra cash by placing ads on your website! Take a look at the Free Tutorial and see just how easy it is to put up a website!

Happy Memorial Day……Support our Troops!!!

 

 


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Beginner’s Blog-One Week Down

Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008 by momscashblog | 15 Comments so far

 It’s hard to believe I’ve only had this blog for a week…it sure feels like a month has gone by! Since this is a Learning Blog, I am going to reveal some mistakes and problems I have encountered, just to give you an idea of how it’s been going for me…I am hoping it will be helpful for those of you who are THINKING of starting a blog, but feel intimidated by the whole process, just as I did before I started.

 The mistakes I have made, mostly pertain to the posts, so you all got to see them! Lucky me! Like the first post that was all in bold ( I did that on purpose by the way! Not, and I obviously didn’t proof it very well.)When I woke up the next day I opened my laptop to look at my site and said “who wrote that?” (and I swear I wasn’t drinking!) When I saw the “read more” line at the end, I clutched my heart and said….”Oh no! There’s more?”( I still couldn’t believe it was ME!) but I took a deep breath and bravely read on. It was pretty painful to see all of those glaring misspellings, typos, redundant words, bad grammar, and rambling on and on. I remember one of my sisters telling me on the phone to write my post in a document draft, print it out and read it, make corrections and read it again and repeat. She worked in publishing for 21 years, but I didn’t listen to her cuz I know how to write and proofing is easy! Right? Why I can do that with my eyes shut..( and it sure does look like my eyes were shut.) (more…)


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Blogging Time Saver – Take a day off!

Posted Monday, April 14, 2008 by momscashblog | 6 Comments so far

Alright, so I confess. Every now and then I like to take a day off from blogging. Well, you’re probably thinking…when do you do this Krysti? There seems to always be a new blog post here on Moms Cash Blog daily! Yes, but that doesn’t mean that I actually blogged that day! Hmmmm…now I have you thinking huh?!

What I do when I plan on taking a day or few days off…is simply BLOG AHEAD of time. There are a lot of people who don’t realize that the can do this, and it really is very helpful to any blogger. We all need a break sometimes yet we know that if we don’t post a blog post, our readers may disown us…Really.
It is important to keep your blog fresh, interesting and full of good quality frequent posts…so what I do is take a block of time (usually an hour or two…or three) and write or record a few blog posts. Then instead of clicking publish when I am done, I just click save and it gets saved as a draft. So on that day I want to take off, or go on vacation or allow myself the time to be sick in bed on those yucky days…I just access my WordPress admin, go to manage…choose the blog post draft and publish it. Wha-La – I can post a good quality blog post in a blink of an eye and it is awesome! I recommend that if you do not have at least one back up (draft) blog post saved, to do so immediately. Because you never know when you’re going to need a break…and you don’t want to leave your peeps hanging. Just a fun fact from Mom’s goody blog bag. If you need help you can email me at krysti@momscashblog.com anytime…or if you want your blog hosted on WordPress platform or need to create a money making blog like mine here and don’t know how – CLICK HERE for my FREE blog tutorial.


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