How Virtumonde helped kill my Blog
I am coming off an experience
bloggers shudder thinking about:
being locked out of your own blog.
The virus Virtumondi was reading my keystrokes, stealing my passwords then locking me out of my life!!
At first readers were not affected, at least I had that to smooth my feathers. It wasn’t until the theme became corrupt, readers would only see the number 1 in the upper left against a field of white , that true panic set in!
It seemed to take a long time making the fix(s), due to a personal trifecta coming together all at once: my office computer picked up Vintumondi, I can’t log into my blog from work due to the virus, our home internet service is upgrading lines, causing outages. All these coming together at once can cause a lot of undue stress and aggravation.
The blog lock outs, due to unknown the password changes, happened immediately after using the infected system and I knew why. The virus did many things, one was reading your internet cache then reported the goods back to their mothership. I learned this quickly after logging into my blog from the infected system, only to be locked out yet again. Now in the midst of battling Virtumondi at the office, I now have my blog issues to deal with, perfect.
The downside of this is that I can’t do any blog maintenance from my work computer until it is resolved. After 3 days of cleanup I thought the work issue was over, I tested the blog log in on Wednesday, locked out again! Just Host emailed a fix almost immediately after I emailed them, but it would have to wait until I was home again. Before I could get back home my blog appeared to be gone. I couldn’t log in from the office to check, due to the virus, I had nothing but a dead blog to look at, can you feel my pain?
As soon as I arrive home (picture purse, keys, shoes flying as I run to my laptop!!) I discover all my files intact (thank you) but somehow the theme files have become corrupt, easy to fix right, wrong! Switch to a new theme, delete then reinstall the corrupted theme files and voila, one would hope it was that easy peasy.
In the middle of switching to a new theme, my internet connection went out! When it came back on my blog was set up in this dummy theme, ugly, but, at least, readable, wp-admin returns an error on my screen is all I see. ** cue the vapors…. Now It was late, I was fried mentally, I responded by reaching over and shutting everything off.. It would have to wait until morning, which was now only 4.5 hours away.
Thursday morning came, I resolved it, or so I thought, soon after the blog gone again. This is how I spent my day on Thursday, my blog was dead in the water yet I couldn’t touch it until I got home, oh hell ~ day two.
We had intermittent internet issues all Thursday afternoon and into the evening as they repaired line issues. I chose to leave the blog issues alone until Friday morning, I gave up!! I had had enough at this point, between the office battle of the virus during the days then the battle of the blog in the evenings I was drained.
When I woke Friday morning my first action was to submit another service ticket, I explained the events the day previous, within minutes everything was reset and here I am now writing this post telling you about my last 36 hours.
I am now on the other side of this event (I hope) and thought I would share my experience. Perhaps I could have repaired this on my own had I taken the time to research the inner workings of the code, however, due to events out of my control I used the easy button. The easy button, yes, I submitted a support ticket to my host and within minutes the problem was resolved. ( I could have just restored a previous backup I suppose)
I must say I was very happy with, Just Host, during this whole episode, they responded quickly to repair issues. Within 2 minutes of a support ticket I had a direct response, followed by a surprisingly quick resolution of my problem. If any of you have ever had to call service support or any technical service you know just how long, and frustrating, those calls can be, this was not at all like that.Perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining since it was so quick, yes I know that’s what you are thinking.. I just thought the same thing, it was the way the whole process played out that made it suck so much.
Has this ever happened to you, have you been nailed by Virtumondi or killed blogs? I haven’t had enough experience, yet, with wordpress to feel comfortable messing around with code. What would you have done to avoid this and how would you have resolved it quicker?
In the end… 
( The high usage of smilies is due to my trying to calm my nerves)
I can’t think of anything as bad as this! I might take a triple look at my security…
You know I have been thinking the same thing and I will be looking for both ASAP! It was terrible and thankfully it is over..
Oh my! =:-o
That is about all I can say. Okay Janet, now follow these directions very, very closely.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
Repeat as needed. 🙂
What an incredible ride. Glad you made it through – finally.
Rus
And now you know a bit of the background to the “breathing to relax techniques” in my last snippets post. 4-8-8 baby…
I still have more work to do today, I want to check all my adsense codes and such to be sure nothing has been altered.
Thanks for your support however.
Personally, I would have curled up into a fetal position, and screamed “honey!!!! My blog is gone caputsy!!! HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP!!” Until he came and fixed everything. But that’s just me. I’m glad it’s all up and running again.
Shair, believe me I was curled up into the fetal position for a bit, I had to turn my attention elsewhere or just lose it.. Now I will only log in remotely with a contributor login so hackers can’t see my admin panels..
UGH on the virus issues. There is always someone out there that thrives on the total misfortune of others…what a sad world we live in. Glad you are back up and running! Hope the rest of your day and holiday weekend goes better!
Thanks Missy.. It was a very tense 36 or so hours, I am not sure about the office situation as of yet. When I go back to work I will run more tests.
Hey Girl! Wow! I feel your pain but I have Tech people on my side so all I’d have done is sent the code to my code reader best friend and he would have fixed it for me. I need to have him create a nice website for me. lol.
I just can’t imagine the frustration you were feeling this whole time! Now did you infect the office? lol.
Woo I covet your tech connections, it would be great to have that myself I am slowly learning the process through experience and college courses, I have more to learn I am afraid.
Frustration would be putting it lightly.. 😉
Damaging someone’s blog is like stealing their new car.
Evil, Evil people! I’ve been thinking about you for a couple of days maybe I was feeling your pain through the air waves.
So glad your issue was handled. I think the suggestion of looking at your security is a wise one.
Have a save weekend.
It is always good to have a backup plan in place and also to have good security. From now on my work log in will be with a contributor’s log in so there will be no access to the admin side.
Thank you for commenting.
WOW That’s the worst. I’ve had some bad virus myself but through the power of my brilliant CPU friends “nerds” I’ve always been able to recover anything lost.
I still battle with this bad boy at the office, I am thinking I want to get a tablet to use remotely and stay away from logging into machines I don’t have 100% control over. I certainly appreciate your comments, you don’t have an avatar, do you use Gravatar ? (gravatar.com) If not you should check it out as it takes only a few moment to set up and helps identify you all around the web.
That is a pretty awful virus but as you have mentioned with a good supportive host most problems can be resolved quickly.
Thank you for your comment, I did have a great host site which made the process of getting back online quick and painless.