That something was vulnerable in a website and someone was sending massive amounts of spam email, through my website email server. I've been screwing with this ever since.
The usage was usually low. These aren't big ticket websites, there's just my little store and Brian's company website. And a couple of other domains that never did much. One I'd never set up, there was just an index page and the benny website that had one page that sent you to a different place. One page each. Then there's another website that's private, password protected, with some old movies on it. Nothing major, just some friends and family stuff that no one else would be interested in.
The physical memory usage ran around 35-40MB a day. I have a limit of 1GB. So, usage has been well under limit for years. Since last weekend, the usage has been running a little under 370MB. Ten times as much as normal.
Not so this past week. That limit was reached at least twice. The question was why. And that's what I've been doing all week long.
Files had been added to a couple of directories. The two one page directories. Checking my logs, there were thousands of hits and referrals to other websites. Prescriptions. How tos. Best ofs. Lots of wordpress links. It was all new to me. And I started deleting. That was the easy part.
Then there was the code that had been added to PHP files. Usually the files named "index.php". If there had been no "index.php" file in the first place, something put one there. What a nightmare this has been. I was able to get rid of most of those files, only one was needed for the store, none were needed for the company website and the one program that did have a fair amount of index.php files, has been taken off line. I've contacted the developers about this.
I've changed passwords with a password generator. I can see it now, I'll have to do a password reset every time I want to enter a site. I have them in a safe place, but what a nightmare.
This technology stuff has been pretty much non-stop since we got the new computers last year. I need a break from this, but I can't stop until I'm sure the store and the business website are secure. I'm just worn out right now.
One of my opinions about this stuff is the emails Brian gets about raising the company visibility in search engines. Offers with guaranteed results. I think I know how they do it. By doing what's been done to our websites. They add the code, the search engine crawlers find the links, and with those links, those webpages go up in the search engine standings. It's the only thing that makes sense to me.
So, I've done dozens of re-directs. When those crawlers reach those folders that were added or files that were changed, they get redirected to google.com. Let the search engines crawl the search engine.
I'd rather be cutting paper or taking pictures of paper I've already cut and assembled. I don't want to be up at one in the morning because I can't sleep, upgrading software for hours. This really sucks.
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