A few days ago, a big, red Google Safe Browsing “Reported Attack Site” pop-up appeared, when I opened my website. After a bit of research, I found this meant that my website had been compromised and some idiot had placed malware (malicious software) on my blog. I’ve spent hours getting rid of suspicious looking code, changing password and securing my website again (plus help from a total stranger in a forum and a lovely PR emailing me to let me know about the malware, in case I didn’t know!) and it’s all clean now (you can scan it with site-checks like Sucuri if you’re unsure! It’s also great to check other websites, particularly if you have your own!)

The pop-up would’ve (or should have) stopped you from accessing my website (and not many of you click through to the blog itself anyway and prefer to read it via RSS) but if you don’t already, please run an anti-virus on your computer, to double-check for infected files. I ran one today and found a few files that were seemingly harmless and haven’t got any sensitive information, but shouldn’t have been there. I’m not certain they were in any way related to the malware on my blog, but it’s just good practice to check for virus’!

Now the review from Google is clean (although you will still see the badware warning when my website comes up in Google search results, as it takes a while to change— grrr!), normal posting will resume. I didn’t want to post anything while there were problems, as my posts are linked automatically through Twitter and I didn’t want to risk anyone opening up the blog!