Archive for the ‘Money Blog’ Category:
Why You Can’t Edit Your WordPress Files: The MagPie Hack
I had trouble finding information on this when I was looking so I thought I would write about it on my make money online blog for all those that might be going through this. Starting about 2 weeks ago I noticed I couldn’t edit my wordpress templates. Every time I would try to edit the files on wordpress I would get an ‘authenticate’ login screen. I would put in my username and password, but nothing would happen and I couldn’t ever change the files. I thought this was something with my host. I chatted with someone online and they say they’d submit a ticket. Never heard back. I chatted with another person a few days later and he didn’t know what was going on either. Finally, I submitted a support ticket and they told me I had been hacked.
When I read about similar hacks, I found out how clever the hack was. The people that were doing this would leave everything in place except there just seemed to be a gliche. So you couldn’t edit the code but you could still post. To top that off, the way they made money was anytime someone searched for your site and found it, they would be redirected to a parked page with on topic links. As an added detriment to you, if Google sees this happen, they’ll drop you way down or out of the search rankings altogether. I was extremely mad when I realized this. I mean it’s the same thing as someone picking up your wallet and spending your money.
The alarming thing is even some of the wordpress blogs on another of my servers had the same malicious code, but this time I still could edit the files. So I would have never known! I don’t know if they had carried out there master plans yet, but I know at least one of my site’s traffic was being diverted because I tested it out myself. The hack was again smart because I never search for my website through the search engines – even if I’m looking to see where it’s at – because I don’t want to skew my Google Analytics. While I give these criminals credit for cleverness, keep in mind, I know they are still scumbags.
You may have this malicious code embedded in your wordpress and not know it. This was a complete pain in the ass for me to learn and then go down the row of all my blogs – I ended deleting several unused ones before even starting. Here is what you should do:
1. Login to your control panel.
2. Go to my php admin.
3. Click your wordpress data base – this will look something like name_wrdp39.
4. Click to edit your options.
5. You will get a table full of options results, scroll down the list and look for something that looks like “rss_1a5f760f2e2b48827d4974a60857e7c2″
6. To the right of such text you will see “O:9:”MagpieRSS”:17:{s:6:”parser”;i:0;s:12:” or a small cluster of numbers
7. Delete all lines containing rss_#L#L#L##L#”.
8. I would delete every user except yourself from the blog unless you know who the other users are. You can do this inside your blog or in the myphp admin data base.
9. After you do this update all of your wordpress versions to the latest version – 2.71 currently. Make sure you do this for all of your wordpress websites.
10. For added security change your password.
Now I am no code expert – far from it. I had to learn all this stuff last night with a helpful blog and guessing and checking so this might not all be correct, but I think, I think this is working for me and I would have hoped that someone else would write the same if they came across this.
In case this post isn’t dated, this is blog is of May 18, 2009. Be vary careful because you can very well have what I call the MagPie Hack (some of the code has magpie in it) and not know it. I’d suggest going in and inspecting your code. One of the last pieces of advice is for you to make sure you have cleared every last strand of code from your lines. Sometimes it is lumped together and other times it is fragmented. Last tip for beginners – if you only see 30 lines showing, expand that to 300.
Good luck and if you need help, you can email me.
BloggerForum.com Shut Down
If this make money online blog looks different to you, its because it is. I decided to change the template to increase CTR. On to the real story: I was looking to sign up for a new money making forum when I came across what looked to be a really nice forum – BloggerForum.com. Unfortunately when I tried to sign up, I realized they had shut down due to being innundated with spam. I feel bad because they obviously had a good operation going judging by the amount of links they had.
I too have had to shut down some of my smaller forums because of spam and my larger money forum needs to be monitored to prevent continued abuse/spam. I have put forth so many restrictures, but like bloggerforum posts, nothing seems to matter to spammers because their time is so cheap. I fear that when my money forum gets bigger, I may be forced with a similar outpouring of spam. I still get a ton of spammy posts but I let them go because they technically aren’t doing anything wrong (the spammers flock because of my do-follow signatures).
Hopefully as technology improves, the Internet can better keep out spam to keep us productive, efficient, and making money online.
ClickBank’s New Pilot Program
This sounds like it has huge potential for the make money online community. The application process has been filled by those looking to get in on the beta ground pilot so I couldn’t join but listen to the reasons to join from the ClickBank blog:
Because of generous commissions, placing ClickBank ads on your site means you can receive much larger payouts than from traditional pay-per-click or display ads Quick and easy ad creation and insertion process Ad filtering lets you only display ads that are relevant and appropriate to your Web site’s audience Highly customizable ad layouts and formats can be easily integrated into all kinds of sites, including blogs, forums and more
ClickBank has a history of paying well, with members making thousands off their affiliate programs. This can only be good for user online advertising revenues. With more competition, Google will be forced to raise their payout rates or lose tremendous business. Thanks to ClickBank for getting in this race. You can read the ClickBank Blog for more information and updates.
Blogger Dreaming of Money
For some of you – how sweet would it be to imagine yanking a cool $50,000 a year just of blogging? Imagine waking up, grabbing some cereal, writing about a topic you enjoy then just going about your day. Rinse and repeat. It happens. Some people make even more than that. The truth is there are more people blogging than ever before, but the truth is also that relative to the number of people out there, there really aren’t that many bloggers so there is still a market share out there for you to nab. I blog about money because I’m business oriented, but the possibility to what you can blog about is only limited to your imagination. Start blogging today. Its a slow process but once you get going you’ll realize how much potential having a web page can have.
