Category: Uncategorized

While WordPress is great software, its ubiquity means that a lot of script-kiddies and general hackers like to attack it. All of the different settings, options, plugins and the rest mean that it takes quite a bit of work to balance letting people participate (through comments, postings) while keeping spammers and hackers out.

About a year and a half ago, my blog was hacked. I was notified of it by Google’s webmaster tools, and it took quite a while to go through all the different files to find the offending code and strip it out. It ended up being located in a number of different places, so it took a few go-through’s re-submitting the site to Google before the hack-detection software declared it clean.

I was always a little worried that I hadn’t gotten it all. Recently, I came across a great couple of blog posts that I highly recommend:

• This is a good general description of why you need to be worried and links to a couple of tools you can use.
• This is a link to a WordPress plugin called “Exploit Scanner.” I uploaded it to this blog and found a number of files that were clearly hacker-installed. I’ve since un-installed them, but want to post some things to help anyone else that might face the same situation in the future.

— — — — — — — — — — —

Files that were uploaded:
fx_akismet.php
fx_blogger.php
fx_I10n.php
fx_menu.php
fx_wp-config.php
fx_wp-db-backup.php
… and a folder of 70 html files and a javascript file meant to steal Google PageRank

All the php files were nearly identical. Here’s the code:

I don’t code in php, so I don’t really know what this says, but hopefully it might be useful to anyone afflicted by the same script.

I highly recommend if any of you have WordPress blogs to take these same steps to see if you’ve been hacked.

Note 1 — A VERY local Failblog

If you haven’t ever heard of Failblog, it’s simply hilarious. Every day there are a ton of photos and videos that can only be described as “FAIL.”

But Thursday there was a post called “Bus Driver Fail”. What’s great about this is that the video was taken at my local bus stop! It’s literally just a couple hundred meters from home.

Just check out the video here:

http://www.viddler.com/player/9b6127d8/

[If you can’t see the video, just click here.]

Note 2 — A Wikipedia entry for a 500-person town

When I was very young, I grew up in the rural Minnesota town of Danube, Minnesota. The other day I just happened to look it up on Wikipedia, and found the entry hilarious. Clearly some local has turned it into a bit of a brochure for small-town America. Examples include:

Danube Pride

While the people of Danube may appear to be normal small-town dwellers, they in fact have a very rare and highly regarded sense of pride for their quaint city in Minnesota. Many residents have been noted as saying proudly, “Danube is the heart of God’s Country.” or a blunt reply, “This is Danube, of course it’s awesome.” This is most evident in the people who were born and raised in or near Danube. This sense of pride typically continues into adulthood and in many cases it continues even after they have moved away from their hometown.

and

Activities

The youth of Danube enjoy some unique activities that help to keep Danube special. The youth ride bicycles as their way of getting around, and typically have ridden their bikes through the streets and sidewalks of Danube enough to accumulate 5,000 miles (unofficially). Skinned knees are an epidemic with these youth. […] 
In their teenage years, residents will typically discover that the Danube water tower can be climbed (much to the chagrin of the city maintenance workers and the lone police officer) for a great view of the city and the surrounding area. […]
Adult activities include “going up town” for lunch at the cafe, catching up with the gossip at “The 1-Stop”, “going up town” to get the mail, or attending the high school’s various sporting events. Nightlife is monopolized by Miller’s on Main — the residents’ only choice for a place to sing some karaoke.

On a side note, my mother used to own the cafe mentioned above…

As a former resident of Danube, I suppose I have to have that “Danube Pride” described above. And to be fair, I do have fond memories of the town, though generally through visits with family friends after we moved away…

Note 3 — Google Waving

If you haven’t heard of Google Wave, it’s a new tool for collaborating that Google announced earlier this year. I recently got an invite and have been playing around with it. (If you’d like an invite yourself, just let me know.)

But here’s a video of Google Wave, um… “simulating” the movie Pulp Fiction. It’s pretty funny. Check it out here: (Not safe for work)

I noticed a few weeks ago that Marc Andreessen had deleted virtually everything off his blog. The only thing that’s left is the post announcing the formation of his VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

I’ve been such a huge fan of Marc’s writing, and hated to see so many brilliant and incredibly helpful posts lost. So I went to the Internet Wayback Machine and copy/pasted all the posts they had (through March 2008). I had also subscribed to Marc’s blog via Feedburner e-mail, so grabbed all of the e-mails I had saved to fill in the gaps.

To be clear, I have no ulterior motives other than making sure that Marc’s posts can be found and useful to entrepreneurs everywhere. (And if Marc wants me to take it down, I would reluctantly do so… hopefully he won’t!)

blog.pmarca.comwas like a meteor from June 2007 through the spring of 2008. Here are a bunch of my favorite posts:

• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 1: Why not to do a startup
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 2: When the VCs say “no”
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 3: “But I don’t know any VCs!”
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 5: The Moby Dick theory of big companies
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 6: How much funding is too little? Too much?
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 7: Why a startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives
• The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 9: How to hire a professional CEO
• The truth about venture capitalists, Part 1
• The truth about venture capitalists, Part 2
• The truth about venture capitalists, Part 3
• The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 0: Introduction
• The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 1: Opportunity
• The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 2: Skills and education
• The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 3: Where to go and why
• The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, part 1: Turnaround!
• The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, part 2: Retaining great people
• Luck and the entrepreneur, part 1: The four kinds of luck
• Counterpoint: Ben Horowitz on micromanagement
• CEO Crime & Punishment
• The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet
• Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data
• The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity
• How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

Click here for the full archive on pmarca-archive.posterous.com

Some quick cautions and warnings!

• The link addresses aren’t changed, which mean they’re prefaced by the Internet Wayback Machine archive link. If you look at the link you’ll figure out which part to delete to go to the right address.
• Some videos have been taken down, or I couldn’t find the embed code.
• I tried to include every post he made and not filter anything. However, I may have missed a few. Please let me know (via comment below) if you have any that aren’t in the archive.

I hope this is useful to some of you out there. And Marc, if you read this, I’m a big fan and only mean for this to help the millions of entrepreneurs you’ve inspired.

So my undergraduate degree is in aerospace engineering, from the University of Michigan. (Go BLUE!) As I wrote yesterday, I am and always will be an aero geek.

But perhaps I also chose it for long-term earning potential? A blog post in the New York Times showed this graph of the “Top 10 College Majors That Lead to High Salaries”:

Of course, I didn’t choose it for the salaries; I just love aerospace technology.