Greetings, friends! I am proud to be able to report that Effing the Ineffable is back up and effing running once again, and is malware free!

Here’s what happened for those who might wonder if this could happen to you and what to do: Apparently Google had indexed the site and found malware, which is why you all received that warning when searching the page or even reading in your google readers. I looked for some instructions on what to do, but I wasn’t really sure how to find the malicious code, so what I would up doing was this: I exported a file containing all the posts, pages, and comments (easy to do with WordPress’s “export” tool). I also downloaded copies of the /public_html folder from the site via FTP. Then, I held my breath and deleted EVERYTHING. At that point, kateo.org was completely blank.

I then did a re-install of WordPress and put up a placeholder post while I considered what to do. I found a free site that will scan a URL looking for malware, and used it to confirm that the site was now safe. It was. Then I had to decide what to do about re-importing old posts – what if the code was in one of them? I took my chances and figured if that did turn out to be a problem, I could just delete again. So I imported all the old posts (with the WP “import” tool – this took literally less than one minute). I opted not to import any attachments, which means that any posts where I’d uploaded the images directly to kateo.org will have blank spots where the picture should be. (Most images are still here though because they’re hosted on flickr and embedded here via html.)

Once I had the posts back, I scanned the site again and got the result that it was blissfully clean and free from malware! Success! This means (I think) likely the malicious code was somewhere in a database, not a post or comment.

Because the theme I’d been using was reported to have some vulnerabilities (a friend alerted me to this on Twitter), I opted not to reinstall it. An updated version of the theme exists, but I thought it seemed safer, for now, to stick with the native WordPress theme, which is what you see here. I like the large header images, which I have set to rotate randomly among several of my own photographs. The clean white space is a nice look, too, I think.

So here you go! The blog is back! I have plenty to report in other life topics, so I will get back to your regular general blather again soon.

Oh, and could a few of y’all try leaving a comment? I need to test whether my comment notification emails are working again. Thanks in advance!