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The “Comber 38” Viagra Hack

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Just when I though the Drunkjeans Hack had passed over, there’s another attack on a couple of my sites. I’ll call it the “Comber 38” hack. These hacks are most likely related.

What does this hack do?

With Comber 38, your sites are turned into Viagra Promo sites. Search for “viagra hack” and you’ll see how common this problem is.

Even though your home page may still work, the hackers use your site as a storage for images that can be pulled in from other sites, hence poncing off your server’s bandwidth.

If these files are linked to, your site is redirecting to some viagra site. It gioves the hackers and spammers direct link to a clean site rather than having to use their spam domains directly. If it wouldn’t be so evil, you ould argue it’s a pretty bright idea…

In fact, here’s what’s in one of those files:

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The Drunkjeans.com / Roundstorm.com Hack and how to get rid of it

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Saturday morning a couple of my sites were hacked by something I’ve not found a lot of info about. I’ll call it The Drunkjeans Hack. I’ve also found this being inserted from other domains (see below).

Some idiot has inserted a piece of code into the main index.php file that looks like this:

The first line calls a JavaScript file on the given domain, while the second line is a unique identifier (consider yourself an individual).

What this thing does is unclear, but depending on how far the hackers get with this, it could be anything from a wonky homepage to the entire site being down. I did some digging and here’s what I found out:

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Testing HyperDB

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I’m as excited as a kid in a candystore! I’ve heard a lot about HyperDB and what can be done with it, and I’ve been thinking how cool it would be to implement it on the sites I’m hosting. And today my friends I’m proud to say that IT WORKS A TREAT!

Hyper What?

Let me tell you a bit about HyperDB. It’s another super cool Automattic project fronted by Matt, Andy, Ryan and Blogluftwaffe. It’s a rather complex plugin for WordPress that will let you specify more than one Database Server. In a high production environment your one and only Database Server can get busy or even crash and die – so all websites would be down until you restart it.

HyperDB solves this by letting you specify several servers in the handy db-config.php file. You can set one as master server for write queries and several others for read queries. This means that the master server doesn’t get bothered with read queries while several other servers can deal with those. If one read server dies, the others can pick up the slack. It’s genius!

The Experiment

Before a general roll-out to live sites a little test might be an idea. Currently I have three servers at my disposal and a dev site for testing. All servers are running CentOS 5 in a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit installations, with Plesk 9.3/9.5 on them. Here’s my setup:

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How to increase the Upload Limit in phpMyAdmin?

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Since phpMyAdmin is written in php, all we need to do is change the file upload limit in the php.ini file. On CentOS and RHEL distributions, this file is located in /etc/php.ini Find this section: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; File Uploads ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Whether to allow HTTP file uploads. file_uploads = On ; Temporary directory for … Read more

WordPress 3.0 is here – but should you upgrade today?

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Fellow WordPressers,

Looks like the big news just broke – WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is here (that’s named after Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk by the way). You may have seen an upgrade notice in your dashboard already that urges you to upgrade.

Which is why I thought I’d drop you a message:

DON’T UPGRADE UNTIL YOU READ THIS MESSAGE!

This is especially important to users of the WP Ecommerce Plugin, which IS NOT compatible with WordPress 3.0 (I’m thinking of Davey Lee from Western Straia here). Trust me, I’ve tried it on my Beta Site. It’s all tears and no joy from there.

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How to change “View with Piclens” message in NextGen Gallery

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Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin is certainly the best there is, even though I find it a tad too complex at times. I love it though, and I use it on all my sites whenever I want to upload a batch of pictures and insert them into my posts with little hassle and great convenience.

One thing that bugs me though is the message that reads

[View with Piclens] above my thumbnails, which gives the viewer a chance to see my gallery as a slideshow. It’s a great feature.

Trouble is, nobody actually knows what PicLens is or what it does – including myself, let alone my readers.

Lucky for us, it’s fairly easy to fix – let me show you how:

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How to create Rotating Ads on your site

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I was looking for a solution that displays more than just one advert or banner in one spot. Say I have some space in my sidebar and I wanted to display some adverts there – but I don’t want them to be the same one all the time.

I’d like a solution that upon a page refresh gives me a random banner out of a selection that I can define.

Enter Datafeeder’s Random Ads V2 Plugin!

As if these people had read my mind, this amazing plugin does exactly what I had imagined in my dreams:

You can define several groups of banner codes (say one for vertical sidebar banners, one for pre-post horizontal banners, etc). You can add as many groups as you like, and add as many “code-snippets” as you like to each group.

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How to modify MANSION by GraphPaper Press

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I wanted to use Mansion for my Miami Beach Huts website. It was ideally suited, however all my images are portrait instead of landscape. Some tweaks were necessary which I thought I’d share with you for endless hours of fun.

I wrote this for Version 0.2 of this theme. A few things have changed since then, especially the documentation. Keep that in mind while I’ll talk you through some tips and tricks of MANSION.

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