Unfortunately, my blog was hacked. There was a malware breach at GoDaddy, my hosting provider, which affected how my blog links worked.
I first learned something was up when Google tagged my blog as “potentially hacked.” I ran a scan, and, lo and behold, there was a funky bit of script in a WordPress file. I deleted it.
But, the problem didn’t end there, as some search engine links to 19 blog posts ended up being redirected to a Russian site. Others have experienced the same thing.
I didn’t know what was up and even went on Twitter to ask for help. First, I thought it was a Google crawling problem and had my domain recrawled, both with and without the “www” prefix.
That didn’t help.
Fortunately, Ben Brunt and Peter Lessels lent a hand and were kind enough to private message and email help.
And, it worked!
The .htaccess file at Go Daddy was corrupted. Once I knew the problem, it took seconds to fix. But, finding the root cause took hours, including a great deal of searching on the Internet.
We are only in the beginning phases of widespread cybercrime.