Well it seems that I have had a hell of a time cleaning up my website from its recent hack. Gotta love it when the first time you find out about your site being compromised is via google.
So what happened to me is someone uploaded a whole bunch of files to my WordPress directory with links to god knows what content. So after going through those directories (numerous times!) and cleaning them up and deleting outdated random files I think it is finally clean.
I was looking for something to monitor my website directories for any file changes or any random uploads that I didn’t authorize. I came across this PHP script that you can put in your root directory and then you set a cron job to run the script every so many hours.
The script emails a specified email address and lets you know of any changes since the last run.
Download Monitor Hacked Files
This is a great little app that can save you lots of time and frustration when restoring a computer from scratch. I just rebuilt an old laptop and spent a fair amount of time hunting around for the drivers as we lost the restore CD some time ago. This software makes a quick backup of all your drivers and then you can store that somewhere and if you need them just popin the CD and restore the old drivers!
So I have decided to resurrect an old laptop that I had sitting in my office for about 2 years. Well after $40 to quadruple the memory and replacing the hard drive and then re-installing XP from scratch and then all the manufacturer drivers, we finally are in business. I then plugged this into my network and our LCD TV and the stereo. So it is our own little home entertainment system for our TV. Well I decided that since this thing would be on 24/7 that I needed to do some automation to some tasks to keep it clean. Because Playon and Hulu and other web based tools like to create awesomely large temp files that just hang around if you do not delete them. Also because it is a WindowsXP machine I figured scheduling a daily reboot wasn’t a bad idea either. Well turns out these are all very simple things to automate and then schedule.
So last night I was bored and decided to redo my entire website (again). I just changed the theme about a week ago, but the more I dug into it the less I liked it and decided I would spend a little more time redoing my blog. After picking a theme I put it on a local copy of WordPress and started banging away. I started changing header images and fixing CSS issues with AJAX overlaps and image overlaps and fixing up a few other issues I noticed. This is usually pretty typical for themes I have found in the past. You get what you paid for and because all these themes are free I guess that would make sense.
Have you ever needed to make a copy of a DVD and wondered how to do it? Well it is very simple. I just used this software to create a copy of our Wedding DVD so we can burn multiple copies and you can also watch the .VOB file via any media player so you do not have to worry about the DVD the software is super easy to use and creates files that can be easily burned to a DVD using NERO Burning ROM.
Have you ever had your CD drive disappear from the explorer window and no matter what you did you couldn’t get it back. Then if you go into Device Manager you notice that it is saying your CD drive has an invalid drive? Only to search and find there are no specific drivers for you to update? Well if you have like I recently did download this little zip file and then run the registry file to clean out the issue. It seems it comes down to a registry hack to fix this issue and it is pretty common in Windows XP. I am not a fan of running registry files and adding them but this one did exactly what I needed it to do.
