So I just woke my wife up at 4am because I thought the Flux Factory WordPress site had been seriously hacked and content deleted. Every page I visited had randomly generated Viagra drivel all over it, looking bleak indeed. I was imagining that some hacker might be in the admin role at that very moment, corrupting the SQL database that is the lifeblood of any blog, and which frankly rarely gets backed up. It’s an easy way to lose months of work.

Thus Christina had to get out of bed and provide me with passwords, with a view to do an emergency blog database backup. But then I checked the pages again and the Viagra spam was magically gone. A test on two other computers revealed the site to alive and well. Which leaves only one conclusion: My work laptop is infected, interestingly enough with a virus that is inserting its own toxic HTML into valid HTTP requests. I can only imagine what it might do to my entered passwords.

Ugh. I’m currently scanning disks with AVG Rescue on a USB stick and anticipating changing a lot of passwords, fair punishment for being too lax about security and maybe downloading the occasional file of ill repute.

Remember, kids: Scan and backup, duck and cover!

Update: Turns out the problem is on the Flux server after all. There is a nasty WordPress infection known as WordPress Pharma that will inject Viagra spam into web pages, but oddly enough only as they are presented to search engines. So the database etc. is untouched but I need to hunt down those rogue PHP files and exterminate them.