As a follow-up to this post – My wife’s Bludomain site – Heather Swanner.com is being hacked EVERY DAY. I fix it, and the next day it is down again. I contacted them and let them know what’s going on and aside from a canned response I haven’t gotten much – pretty disappointing.

In the meantime I simply used htaccess to redirect index.php to home.php since this exploit apparently only affects files named index.php or login.php

If you’re having trouble with your blu site being hacked on a regular basis and only displaying something like:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’”

as a result, please leave a comment. More importantly if you’ve discovered a reasonable solution I’d love to hear it as well. Thanks.

So I emerged from a fantastic vacation weekend to find all of my php sites not working. Each displaying the same simple error message:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’”

After my initial 30 second panic attack subsided I did a little googling and came up with this site: http://www.geeked.info/web-site-hack-loading-microsotfcn/

I’m assuming this is a bot that crawls from site to site. I had websites hacked across three different servers.

Once hacked, the site should produce a tiny iFrame that redirects to microsotf.cn. Don’t visit the page. It will most certainly ruin your day – spyware, malware, whatever. The beauty is – wordpress sites don’t display the iFrame. They just wind up broken. Other sites however won’t appear very different at all and it will be nearly impossible to tell whether the site was hacked or not.

If you’re having this problem simply open the source of the page in question and look a block of code similar to this (either immediately following the body tag or at the very bottom of the source code.):

Delete the offending code – upload (backup the original first, just in case) and you’re back in business.

Thanks to Ed over at http://www.geeked.info/ for having the ONLY blog post I could find on the whole internet about the hack.

EDIT: 7/9/09 – It has happened again to one of my sites. Different block of code, different malware site being loaded – same basic poison/remedy. For those interested in learning how to block an ip address (or range of ip addresses) – click here.

One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.

Say you’re a small business owner with a website with which you sell your goods and services, but you can’t afford the SSL encryption or merchant account necessary to do this. What are the options available to you?

Most web users are familiar with PayPal and the service it offers. What many small business website owners don’t realize is that PayPal can be used to accept payment for your goods and services online until you can spring for SSL security and a more sophisticated shopping cart system.

PayPal is extremely easy to set up, even for someone with low or no web savvy, and the average web user feels very comfortable using PayPal. It’s been around for quite awhile, and most people feel safe handing their money over that way.

The only real downside of using it is when the user hits “Buy Now” they don’t go to a shopping cart but to a PayPal login page, which can lead to confusion and potentially lower sales. Also, because of the way the Paypal log-in page is set up, many users mistakenly believe they must have a PayPal account to proceed, which isn’t the case. However I highly doubt PayPal will be correcting that any time soon, as it’s in their best interest to recruit as many new users as possible.

However, for a small business website owner, who needs to sell a few goods or services, and does not have the time or money to invest in the necessary technology to do so, PayPal is going to be your best solution.

Now, if you’re just starting your website, Paypal may very well be an absolute necessity. It’s very easy to set up, even for someone with little or no web design experience. You simply log in, create products, assign a price, and PayPal will give you a “Buy Now” button, which you can simply copy and paste onto your page. As time and your budget allows, you can invest in more sophisticated methods of accepting credit cards online.

Whatever you do, please don’t even consider using a standard web form to transmit credit card data to your e-mail address. Quite a few clients have come to me and asked why they cannot just do a simple form with a credit card field and have them form e-mailed to them. The answer is simple, standard Web forms have no security built-in, and for a relatively competent hacker it would be a fairly simple task to intercept this information in transit. This method of credit card data retrieval is so dangerous; no ethical web designer in his right mind would do so.