ask-mark.com

Once again I was notified that ask-mark.com was triggering virus/malware alerts for visitors. My preliminary investigation at work showed that I had some sort of script injected into my files again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get cygwin and ssh to connect to my host through the proxy server.

When I got home, I connected to my host and poked around, investigating how my site got hacked again. Not finding any obvious evidence other than file modify dates from yesterday, I decided to restore from one of my snapshots. I found that a snapshot from last week was not affected by whatever hacked my site. I wanted to restore the snapshot without first deleting the entire contents of my site. So, I tried using cp -rf ..., but I found that I was still being prompted to overwrite files. A little searching, and I found that my .bashrc file had an alias for cp = 'cp -i' so that it always ran in interactive mode. Commenting out that alias prevented the overwrite prompts, and now my site is back. I went back and restored the alias to ensure I don’t accidentally overwrite a critical folder in the future.

I just found out that the website for another organization with which I work is facing a similar hack. Does anyone know how all of these websites are getting hacked? Are the CMS packages (WordPress, .NET Nuke) insecure? Or are hackers gaining access some other way?

Also, never underestimate the usefulness of backups.

In the northwest suburbs, I frequent several sushi restaurants: Nobu’s Japanese Restaurant in Schaumburg, Sushi Station in Rolling Meadows, and Wild Fish in Arlington Heights. I like something different about each of them, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but Sushi Ya in Schaumburg is quickly becoming my new favorite.

After opening about a month late due to construction delays, Sushi Ya is a welcome addition to the neighborhood. Michelle and I stopped by the restaurant for dinner Wednesday night, their second night of operation. Two days later I stopped by for dinner with Josh and Marsha before poker night. The staff is very friendly, and I thought the speed of service was pretty good for the first week in business.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. We invited my family over, mostly because my sisters and I are horrible at planning nice stuff, partly because we’re all poor, too. I cooked up the beef pot roast because that’s just about the only nice thing I can make. It was an exhausting 5 hours, but a delicious meal came out of it. Plus, we have leftovers! That’s something that we almost never have when I make this, and that also means that I have dinner for tonight already.

A few funny things happened yesterday. The first: Mel showed up early. The second: Mel asks me, "Since when did you watch NASCAR?" The third and final one I will share: Mel goes, "So what’s this?" and motions around her mouth, referring to my facial hair. For another ten or fifteen minutes, I am the butt of jokes, including Chris repeatedly pointing out that several of her students like what I’ve done to my face. Yup, that’s right, I am the envy of a few high school students. Joy!

We’ll see if I can keep up the blog posts. I’ve got summer break from grad school in about a month, which theoretically means I will have more free time. I might actually have the free time, but I might not choose to blog with it. We’ll see what happens.