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General Internet and technology

Yikes! Temporarily blacklisted by Google!

What you see above is a picture of what Google Chrome showed the visitors of websites that linked to my site for the last couple of days. A similar warning was shown to Firefox users.

First of all, my apologies to all those whose site was affected by this problem.

Apparently my site got hacked somehow, and though everything seemed to be working normally, the truth is that some malicious code had inserted itself into my WordPress installation, resulting in almost every page attempting to redirect users to shady websites.

Google’s frequent security scans detected this and immediately blacklisted Anchel.com as a malware-affected domain, triggering warning messages on all web browsers that use Google’s blacklisting service. And not only that, but every other website that had content coming from mine would receive a similar warning as well. This affected a couple of friend’s websites (such as AloneInTheDark211 as seen in the picture above) and fellow game designer Hugo Bille for whom I’m helping out with the Spanish translation of his upcoming game.

It has taken me much longer than expected, but it seems like I have been able to (manually) take out all the injected malicious code from my web server after several scans, checking many PHP files and asking friends for help.

So, once again, sorry to all the affected people and thanks a lot to Gustav Dahl and Emil Erik Hansen for their advice! Take this as well as a word of warning to everyone out there with a WordPress site! Even if you think your website is not at risk, you’d do well to check your security settings (the WP Security Scan plugin checks for some basic mistakes your installation might have).

And now Anchel.com is back on track!