I doubt anyone really noticed but my website went offline Saturday morning. My uber-fuzzy site admin contacted me to tell me that my wordpress site had been compromised and I was unknowingly sending spam. Apparently about 12,000 a minute. My entire site had to be taken down and destroyed; thankfully the database was unharmed. I downloaded a fresh install of wordpress and using a few magical tricks, completely restored my site (granted there are a few minor casualties).
Spam bots and programs are vicious, maniacal devices.that somehow installed a couple of trojan php files hidden in wp-content folders. This past weekend Daylight Savings Time ended. There is a general rule of thumb that one should change the batteries in your smoke detectors the same time that the times change. I would like to add to that by suggesting that you also change all passwords for all accounts with sensitive material. Granted my blog site doesn’t contain any sensitive material so it hardly qualifies but I had to change my password as part of the process and also decided to retire that password altogether. By doing so it got me thinking that I hadn’t changed that password in such a long time which led me to my conclusion that I should be changing my passwords more regularly.
By the way, when I suggest that you change a password, I would suggest that its something completely different. I wouldn’t advise that you simply just increment a number. I would also suggest that you try to include some special characters into your password and make sure its a minimum of 8 – 12 characters, if not longer. Also, run anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on your computer, I would say as often as once a week depending on your browsing habits. Check out ClamWin for a free and pretty solid anti-virus program. I highly recommend you grab a copy of SpyBot Search & Destroy for your free anti-spyware program. If you have questions using either of these programs, please feel free to ask.