Without naming the blog (this is now under further investigation, so if you know the site, please don’t mention it in the comments, etc.), I’ll say it’s a popular, revenue-generating blog with a very respectable following and technorati ranking.

We didn’t build the site but were familiar with its guts - we do a lot with similar blog software and had recently upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5.1. The warning, though, was new to me. I don’t think we’ve ever had a client that got flagged by Google.

1. To make sure we knew what we were chasing, we verified the site and checked its status in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. The site overview told us that day’s crawl found intermediary links to malware. The list of pages it encountered with the link included the front page, so the issue didn’t seem to be coming from a comment.

2. Viewing the generated source (consider this another endorsement of the Web Developer extension for Firefox and Flock) showed a suspicious iframe being included just inside the body of any blog page. The source of that frame was an offsite link to a malware drop. In other words, the site had been hacked.

What do you do if your site is hacked?

3. I’m not the world’s best hack0r chaser. In fact, when I took off to find the source, I thought I was looking for a simple document.write or crazy hex string somewhere in the hundreds of files / thousands of database entries involved in making the site go.

I checked the wp-posts and wp-comments tables. I disabled the plugins. I turned off the javascript ad calls. All this assuming someone was leveraging a WordPress security hole or injecting code through an ad server. Incorrect.

4. We downloaded all site files and did a local search on the project files starting inside the theme and moving outward. We didn’t find anything.

5. After talking a bit more to the site owner, we decided to just carpet bomb the javascript - remove all scripts on the live site that weren’t already checked. The iframe disappeared.

6. After going through each file manually, we found the hacked code buried inside a script that called Flash to handle some typography on the site. It could have been any where, but that script probably seemed about the least obvious place to attach it. And he / she was right. We missed the eval(unescape(’%64%…’)); on the first pass.

How the hell did that get in there?

7. It’s probably worth mentioning we didn’t have shell access to the server, and we had to ask the web host to send us the access log. When we got it, I was a bit surprised to see the hacker got in via SFTP. They had the password.

8. We changed the passwords to the site, the databases, and to WordPress. Then, 9. went through each file uploaded by the ip address the hacker used. A contact form needed to be re-written. Some WordPress includes were replaced. A few other files were trimmed. A robots.txt file had to be corrected.

10. Now that the site was clean (we hope), we had to take care of the Safe Browsing flag at Google. We requested another review in the Webmaster Tools dashboard. It took about 10-15 hours, but the crawl came back clean and the warning was removed. That was early Sunday morning.

11. The next step is a fresh WordPress install (it’d be great if 2.6 came out of beta in the next day or so). This will remove any doubt that we missed anything nasty outside of the theme or content folders. The web host will need to get involved as well. I’m not sure what kind of monitoring is currently in place, but it can always be improved. All passwords on any related applications will need to be changed.

What they were trying to do.

I’ve seen plenty of malicious code injections. The beta launch of Truemors alone resulted in 3 or 4 different ways clever kids can drop some text into a site. But this one was nasty. Judging from everything we found, it’s pretty clear the perp’s were trying to nuke the site’s ranking in search engines in addition to everything else.

1. The iframe sourcing malware was a blatant flag to Google.
2. An additional page was set up in an attempt to host malware. (another flag)
3. A contact form was hijacked.
4. A script was added to allow a quick password change. (to lock out the site owner.)
5. A robots.txt file was modified to disallow bots.

That last bit (blocking search engine crawls with a robots.txt file) is pretty telling. And scary. Someone was really trying to damage the popularity of the blog, and, from what we can tell, this was just the start.

My point in writing this rather than just twittering a bunch of zomg blurts was to show how quickly someone with proper motivation can damage your livelihood.

In this case, the site owner didn’t have a dedicated team that could immediately correct the issue. He was able to call in a few favors, but it still took him about 36 hours to get turned around (including the review by Google). It could have been longer had Firefox 3 not shipped with browsing alerts turned on by default, and it definitely would have been worse had he not had a few pals familiar with his setup. (Not that I’d rank high on the list of heroes to call.)

The take away here is this: you need to lock down anything you rely on. Keep your passwords clean. Keep your software current. But, more importantly, make sure you have a few emergency contacts. And, pay attention to Google.

This could happen to you. Especially if you’re kind of a big deal.

Now that being social means plotting your location, the issue of oversharing is top of mind again.

It’s not the idea of fellow geeks knowing where I’m at any given time that makes me uncomfortable. I have no problem with brightkite, and I love the idea of you knowing when I’m in ur town so long as I’ve authorized you.

But I check in to public timelines as well. And in those cases, anyone can see where I’m at. As a single person, the concern wouldn’t even occur to me. But family changes this, and lately I’m wondering how much to reveal. (Like whether I’m out of town.)

To put a finer point on it, I’m wondering how much to reveal on Twitter since it’s the one communication app I use that doesn’t allow privacy differentiation within a stream.

I understand Twitter has immediate issues to deal with, but privacy should be high on the list of concerns. Right now it’s not being handled with any amount of sophistication.

I don’t mean to complain about Twitter. The issue is more mine than theirs. And, fwiw, I love the service.

There’s a simple solution, though. Allow members to post private tweets by preceding them with a p. e.g., p You wake up in Vegas.

Those private tweets would only be seen by the people you trust most. I know that everyone follows and follows back to widely varying degrees, but, for anyone using the service, the segment of friends you trust most would be reciprocal followers (i.e., those you follow who also follow you back.)

I have about 150 friends in this category. And even though I don’t really know them all well, I’d trust them to know that I’m out of town or where I’m staying or, maybe, what my family is up to.

I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.

And, while they may have gained some degree of credibility for fighting off the big ugly fish, they’ve also ran off a lot of brilliant people in their scramble.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad Microsoft didn’t get their straw in my milkshake - I have a lot of data inside Y! properties. But I’m still not ready to believe the kick in the head was enough to get them making sense (ie, acting strategically).

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I still say get your money in gold. It doesn’t compete against Google.

Like today, I’m getting ready to deploy a mobile version of a content network and it strikes me that what we really need is a twitter version for all blogs. Basically, it would go like this…

Since userAgent doesn’t actually tell you if the user uses Twitter, we’d simply prompt visitors with a simple question. Use the Twitter? And if they did, they’d just Click here.

At that point, posts would collapse into 140 character bits. Opinions would be condensed for clarity (eg, teh suck or ftw).

An example post would go like this:

zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

And, then, comments would go like this:

@amentele lulz. springsteen is rolling over in his grave. srsly

retweeting @amentele: zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

@amentele - yeah, fail. u missed the best part tho: http://is.gd/AJ

If you’ve been using the Twitter for any amount of time, maybe you’ve already thought of this. For everyone else, I explained this all in an earlier tweet.

Even if Google doesn’t.

The idea came towards the front of a demand explosion at work, so it ended up on the shelf. Since then, a handful of similar ideas have actually made it to the internets, and some are even making a run towards mainstream.

Identity aggregators are going to be more and more popular. Content shards are being shot out in all directions via Twitter, flickr, pownce, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, facebook etc. and it’s impossible to keep track of any one person without tying some of the parts together.

But despite some pretty impressive execution (socialthing is awesome), all these tools fail at the same thing. They blend everything up - different content types from all your friends across all networks - and force it all at you through a single stream. It doesn’t work. But, it could…

People filters.

The aggregators I’m paying the most attention to (spokeo, friendfeed, and socialthing) all have a huge opportunity to do something that most of the originator networks don’t even do themselves: identify contact types. Imagine being able to flip between family, work, friends, etc. A simple tagging / filtering mechanism would launch these services into something extremely useful.

Content [source] filters.

The idea that an aggregator would even launch without the ability to screen content by source or type amazes me. It’s bad enough that everything just gets blended up into a simple mess, but to not provide the tools to untwist it all is just plain mean.

Identity handling

I’ve been trying to keep this familiar by labeling these tools as identity aggregators. They aren’t. They aggregate the content streams of friends, regardless of how those friends identify with each stream. I could very quickly define, rank, categorize and tag my streams to give you clues on how I roll. But, instead you just see stuff with my name on it. Flat like that.

The current tools don’t seem to be paying any attention to this last part. They focus on aggregating content authored within a loose network. Identity is something else entirely. It’s actually the part we were excited about 10 months ago when we registered the domain name. Think how much content definition is lost by not allowing the author control to specify family, work, primary, casual, nsfw, etc.

I hear over and over that web 2.0 is no longer solving real problems. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Or that the space is closing down. Personally, I think it’s still wide open. Geocities got more right than most of the current players. (southbeach, ftw)

The replacement stream sucked, though, so it never made it into the site feeds.

Yesterday I started posting them again the old way. So, if you’re a full site feed subscriber, I hope I didn’t scare you. Post frequency over there is about 15 times the main post feed.

If you’re not getting the full feed, but you’re intrigued, you can subscribe to the asides here (or you can grab the full site feed). You’ll see them in the sidebar now too.

Anyway, now you know. Sorry for the interruption.

p.s., if you’re already clicking through the new asides, the LA Times really did talk with Rick Astley. And, it was really hard not to roll you again right there.

Plot: ten entrepreneurs in an elevator with a VC.

This was captured by Andrew Hyde as we were leaving the Wired party at SXSW. The VC, of course, is Guy Kawasaki. The quote is from one of Andrew’s shirts.

Web2o tipped it for me. Regardless of how I felt about [Tim’s] label at the time, the activity in the field was wild. Keeping up with it meant getting stupid informed, following hundreds of feeds.

The problem at the time was siphoning. I didn’t care about Vista or WoW, but my [hundreds of] feeds were still delivering news of each a dozen times a day. We launched Feed Rinse to help filter out some of this noise, but the information push still seemed way out of control.

Fast forward two years (to today), and I’d say I have the news / info push properly regulated. But all of a sudden, there’s new flavor to the push.

Sites like FriendFeed, SocialThing and Spokeo just jumped into my mix like some kind of Marvel Comics supervillain crew, looking to f with the water supply. Now I have lifestreams to watch.

And then there’s Twitter. Yep, chatter is important now too. I could argue that I probably get as much from tweets as I do from blog posts some days, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s noisy as hell.

My content monitoring seems out of control again. It snuck up on me because the new content is of an entirely different type. I’m guessing it snuck up on you too.

I think I started writing this to see if I was the only person not grooving on the jump lifestreams seem to be making. But now I’m convinced I need to get better at content filtering again. Maybe even get the band back together for another pass at Feed Rinse.

Whatever it is, don’t take it personally if I don’t subscribe to your socialthing. Your digital life is, still, all very fascinating.

Hummel asked for a transcript of the conference, so here goes…

Short version (recommended):

Most of the people I met, I wasn’t expecting to. Most of the people I thought I’d meet up with, escaped. People like Twitter.

Longer version:

Michael and I finally got to meet up with Guy Kawasaki IRL. (Stefan had already caught both Guy and Will in Palo Alto.) After thousands of emails (I was going to say hundreds, but my smart folder says 2,561) I still couldn’t verify whether or not he actually is smiling 100% of the time. He is.

We bowled. Big thanks to Cindy Li and the nclud team for picking up the event. It was all kinds of awesome, and we were proud to be one of the sponsors. I got to say “hey” to Jon Snook and [other] assorted web geniuses. I’ll admit meeting an awkward ego or two, but each was easily ignored.

I got a collectible moo card from Andrew Hyde. And participated in the famous elevator pitch. My pitch was a social network for people who like social networks.

I had lunch with the Twitter famous New Media Jim (Jim Long) and other cools (oh, and some guy named Brian Shaler. Meh.)

I met scores of twitter friends. This seemed weird the first few times, but the feeling quickly passed. Everyone at the conference spends time on Twitter. Handing out business cards didn’t seem to make sense.

The bloghaus was weird (bloggers applauding bloggers, weird). But the connectivity rocked, and so I lurked.

I attended some incredible panels. Sorry for not linking. You’ll have to trust me.

I also participated in my first SXSW panel, True Stories From Social Media. Held in Ballroom A the day after Zuckerberg’s spectacle, I wasn’t sure I’d be adding much, but nobody was paying attention to me anyway. Guy Kawasaki was moderating, and the rest of the panel was female.

We had great food. And a few mojitos.

We missed SXNW and the Great British Booze UP. These were the high points of last year’s conference for me, but dinner with Guy K ran late, the lines ran long, and ambition ran out.

We launched Alltop. It was already live, but we switched the front page just in time to make a few more people hate it.

The weather was perfect. Austin has great energy, and we caught it at the perfect time. I really wanted to stay for music, but not as much as I wanted to get back to a few very specific people at home.

Flights were great. Northwest Airlines didn’t screw up once. My beautiful family was waiting to pick me up at the FSD airport.

Other things happened that I’m sure are worth noting, but my head hurts, so I’ll just recap the takeaway…

1. Twitter is the new blog. Everyone is talking about [Twitter] as a hub.
2. As much as everyone seems to want to conquer it, video is still awkward. Tripods and lights are being lugged around, but people are still using crappy hand cams. A killer [video hosting] app has yet to be found.
3. Bloggers have become very interested in themselves. I can’t tell you how many times I saw blogger a interviewing blogger b. It might be time to get them their own internet.
4. Austin rox.

p.s.: I took a few pics. So did Stefan and Michael.

Not surprisingly, Arrington didn’t like it. (Millionaire tech bloggers aren’t really the target use group.)

A few things do surprise me, though.

First, Arrington pulled the post. Then he put it back up. He twittered about it eight or so times.

The post has also generated all kinds of audience discussion, both on the site (105 comments at last count) and on twitter. Much of this coming from busy people well outside the target market.

I’m writing about it for two reasons. One, we built it. Two, I’m again amazed at Guy K’s ability to generate attention.

This is a very light RSS play, and some of the sharpest tech bloggers are covering it. Some are in such a rush to weigh in that their posts are coming out as jibberish. Jeremiah’s analysis stated it was built using Thomas Marban’s existing code and that Guy was an investor in popurls. (He has since revised the post.) News to Thomas. And at least one small mind has commented that the developers over-charged for the build (some even blog it that way). News to me. Electric Pulp didn’t charge to build Alltop.

Anyway, there’s a story in all this. But I don’t think anyone has picked up on it yet.

And, for what it’s worth, the unadulterated love being thrown at Alltop from outside the inner circle of geeks is wild. (Still not the story.)

If you’re not, keep your eyes glued to my flickr. I’ll be posting in order to convince you to make it next year.

If you are, let me know. Pal up and / or email me @ amentele at gmail dot com.

If you’re interested, the events I’m watching are here and here (with and without hCalendar format, respectively).

Don’t hold me to either schedule, though. I’m traveling light this year and plan on leaving the agenda at home with the heavy computer.

Here’s what I’ll commit to:

• Saturday: I go straight to Manuel’s for enchiladas suizas. With or without you.
• Sunday: we bowl.
• Monday: we hang with clients. And then we club.
• Tuesday: I fly. I think Michael and Stefan do too.

That’s it. Safe travels if you’re going. Best regards if you’re not.

In my youngster years, D&D + small town boredom lured me towards fiction reading / drawing. By early high school, a few of my illustrations had been picked up and published in TSR modules. Some of that feedback encouraged me to decline a health science scholarship and instead pursue a split major in art / biology. I finished my post grad studies as an Architect and then jumped track even further to give chase to a web career.

If not for the creative encouragement, I’d have chosen science. I’d be prescribing amoxicillin right now, and I can’t imagine I’d be enjoying it.

So, sorry for the wandering topic, but I wanted to pay a small amount of respect to a life well played. Godspeed, sir. Thanks for the stories. (And for the name of this blog.)

One of the reasons is that we’re already giving more than that to local causes. If you add up the cash and time we donate, we should be able to rest well knowing we’re giving something back.

More often than not, though, the causes haven’t been of our choosing. They find us, and all too often, they’re efforts we know nothing about.

This feels like a passive aggressive rant now that I’m typing, but that wasn’t the point. I’m all for good. I’m just realizing (after loosing the better part of my Sunday to one such effort) that it’s hard to feel connected to the good when you aren’t even familiar with the cause.

We get drawn into these situations all the time. We’ve been in ops for nearly 12 years now, some of these years were even spent networking in real life situations. The result is that our under served geographic market knows where to find us.

Maybe I’m just talking to myself (and Michael and Stefan) here, but I hate the idea of time and cash donations feeling like a business tax. Just once I’d like to come across a profound effort and ask them how we can help.

Karma -1.