Try Increasing Failure
A New Scarlet Letter
For nearly four months this site had been down. I got hit hard by a website virus called “Timthumb”. From what I understand, the virus gets in through a security flaw in a function that allows WordPress users to grab a photo from the outside world (other website) and post it onto their blog. That was the “in” for these hackers.
The virus would just scour the web using “bots” looking for the timthumb security flaw in websites. After a few weeks Google, in conjunction with major web browsers, blocked my site from anyone in the world accessing it. They did this as a precautionary measure to keep the virus from spreading. Unfortunately all of my SEO and page ranking were blocked and removed too.
The darn thing about it is that visitors who came to thecompleteself.com were shown a big warning page with verbiage like “this is a malicious attack site” which to say the least doesn’t exactly help anyone’s reputation. Malware infected websites seem to be the new Scarlet Letter badge of shame. The letter being “M”.
These hackers have probably cost millions of dollars of damage and lost revenue – not to mention tarnishing innocent bloggers’ good names. I had sever emails to me saying they were looking at purchasing one of my products, but they didn’t feel that they should since one of my sites was considered as a malicious site! Most visitors, including you, probably didn’t know that there were a lot of innocent bloggers and other information websites that were targeted here.
I tried for days (literally full days) to read through instructions and tried to remove the virus manually – doing my best to get rid of it on my own. I had just about given up then I saw an ad for a service that removes the virus and monitors it for a full year for $97. It seemed like a good plan – so I did it. Sucuri did a great job of removing the malware in about 2 hours of my request. They even put the request in with google to re-scan my site. They keep their eyes on it for me to make sure that the site is clean all of the time.
I was overjoyed to see this blog back up and available for people to read. After writing over 100,000 words on a blog, I’m glad to see that you’re reading this right now.
so the next time you see the big “warning this may be a malicious attack site”, it may be that the blogger had nothing to do with it – other than not having updated their blog software.
I always love reading your comments. Please write to me below.
Matthew
