A rather busy week…

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m staring down the barrel of 725 unread items in Google Reader, pondering why I haven’t organised any food, and yet feeling like I should make the most of relaxing for an hour or two before the new week begins.

The good kind of busy has been happening at work, as the whole team at Absolute Radio have been doing more than ever before. If you’re interested in whether or not it works, check out the latest stats and on-demand listening figures. It includes the nice news that 713,000 Absolute Radio applications have now been downloaded to mobile phones, and people used them to listen to 215,000 hours of live audio (mobile development is one of the things I’m heavily involved in).

And to illustrate how fast the company continues to move, on Friday Absolute 80s became a national station on DAB, and we announced a new station, Absolute Radio 90s.

And that’s just some of stuff being worked on…

Meanwhile outside of work, I had the uncomfortable experience of having 2 out of my 3 sites comprimised by the PHP exploit which did the rounds of a number of hosting services.

For updates, and info if you’re affected, I recommend the Securi SecurityWPSecurityLock blog (which includes a great script to easily solve the immediate problem), and the blog (which has some handy guides to backing up and reinstalling your database and content). I hadn’t looked at either site before or heard their names mentioned, but after reading up and using their tools, I’m quite impressed – and both sites offer ongoing WordPress security products I’ve made a mental note to check out.

So all three sites have been tweaked and had clean installs uploaded after some backing-up.

Add in a poorly child (thankfully better now), and Chelsea doing a historic double (Winning the Premiership and FA Cup), and it’ll explain why updates might take a while to get back up to their regular schedule!

Taking a quick security break…

There will be a slight lack of posting at the moment as I scurry around updating various security measures due to WordPress exploit currently doing the rounds.

It momentarily affected www.140char.com, but was removed pretty swiftly, and before I continue with normal posting I just want to take some time to make sure that all of my other sites are as secure as they can possibly be.

Here are some details from Godaddy (Who I’ve got various sites hosted with, and who were very helpful in this situation)

Here’s what happens if your site is comprimised, and how you can spot it.

And here’s a handy tool to be able to remove some of the offending script if you’re affected.

And obviously if you’re not affected at the moment, now is a good time to run a back-up of everything, ensure all passwords for your hosting and admin log-ins are secure, and ensure you’re running the latest updates of WordPress and all plug-ins you might be using (And disable any that you aren’t).

Meanwhile all of my sites will resume normal service once they’ve been locked down like Fort Knox…

Twitter bug let users force celebrities to follow them!

Part of the attraction of Twitter is that it allows you to select which users and information stream you wish to follow to filter out what’s valuable to you from the noise around it.

So pity the likes of Conan O’Brien and Bill Gates who have suddenly found themselves following hundreds of extra people due a Twitter bug. By tweeting ‘accept @username’ that Twitter user would find themselves following you in some form of microblogging mind control (Actually, this is microblogging mind control!). And your new zombie followers will end up seeing your tweets until they unfollow you.

Normally the command is used via SMS to respond to a follower request. The Twitter team is aware of the problem, and while they resolve it, follow count display is set to 0 and follow/unfollow is temporarily offline’.

But although I’m sure it will be resolved quickly, I’m not sure how they’ll be able to reset any dishonest follows without either also catching anyone who was honestly using the SMS command, or leaving a few in place – so you might need to do some Twitter pruning in the next day or so.

140Char falls victim to exploit…

Firstly, let me apologise to anyone that’s visited the site in the past day or so and found themselves redirected to malware.

There’s been a huge wave of exploits affecting PHP sites across the net and across a whole number of website hosting providers, and having read about it and planned to spend some time updating all my sites for added security, I came home to find 140char.com had already been affected.

If you’ve found yourself redirected, please update and run any anti-virus software you have – or indeed download one of the free options and then use it.

The exploit has now been removed, so 140char.com is now safe.

And on the bright side, all of my sites are now updated and more secure than before, and unlike some of the other people commenting around the web, I’ve had some prompt and helpful assistance from my webhosts, Godaddy. They come in for a lot of criticism, but two or three times now I’ve had excellent support.

And now I’m off to lay down in a dark room for a bit to recover from the evening of fun.

Dan