Barn Door

I haven’t written anything lately other than drunken and nonsensical Twitter posts because I have spent almost every free second since Monday dealing with the aftermath of The Great American Jerk Hack of 2009. And sadly, I am the only American for whom dealing with the aftermath of a “jerk hack” involves hours of computer work rather than seconds with a squeegee and/or a kleenex or sock.

Whoever invaded the site did a real fucking number on it. The most obvious thing they accomplished was to set the permission levels of every file and folder so that anyone with a modem and the ability to spell “HTTP” could modify or delete anything that they wanted to anywhere. I was one giggling twelve-year-old with a Web browser at least as advanced as Mosaic and too much free time away from being the proud editor of The American Goatse: The Internet Tubgirl Magazine.

Fixing the permissions of every file and folder took about four carpal-tunnel inducing hours on the FTP client, typing and retyping the Unix command “CHMOD” to the point where my fingers still almost want to move to type those letters spontaneously, making masturbation alternate between a scream-inducing frustrating horror and a confusingly pleasant and exhilarating new experience.

Less obvious was that the hacker tried to hide little program files that would re-propagate his or her control over the site all over the place. I was able to burn off the most obvious and vile parts of the infection when I upgraded the software that runs the Web site… but there were ugly little roots that had been sunk all over the place, any of which could cause the whole mess to come back worse than ever… making me the first person to refer to black hat hacking in a genital wart metaphor. Which is more actually flattering than it might seem, since anyone with enough free time to Pwnz0r my crappy little site is unlikely to come into contact with a genital wart in any other more conventional way.

After weeding out those little logic bombs, I had to pick through the database at the heart of The American Jerk, because it turns out that, not only did the hacker “publish” a hidden post that had all of my login information stuck in it, but he set up a backdoor superuser in WordPress itself that would let him log in and change or publish anything he wanted. So I had to hunt out and delete that little irritation, but on the positive side, I figure that if you’ve seen something here that you didn’t think was funny? Yeah, that prick did it. Apparently he had an unnatural obsession with animal pornography jokes and a mindless hatred for Alaskan politicians, and if you don’t believe me, you have no understanding of the concept of reasonable doubt.

So after the great cleanout, I decided it was time to review my Web site security countermeasures, and a little Googling showed me that there were steps I could take to keep the site safe. I thought I’d had a good security countermeasure in place, but unfortunately none of the pros recommended relying only on my policy of fervent prayer.

So I spent about a day and a half putting together a labyrinthine combination of protecting key directories under passwords with more special characters than a sitcom about retards, dummy files, weird security permissions and the deletion of files that the pros said were the useless, vestigial tonsils of WordPress, but which sported names like “DO_NOT_DELETE.php”.

I did so many changes and deletions and lockdowns that I have no idea why the site even still works. The whole operation felt like curing a heart attack by ripping out the heart, yet somehow the fucker’s still walking around… so we might as well teach it to sing Putting On The Ritz to still get laughs out of it.

But now that it’s all said and done, it was all worth it, because now I know that The American Jerk is mine again, and will remain mine… right up until the moment some Russian hacker bumps into his mouse and drools Stoli into the “A” and “J” on his keyboard.

[tags]Wordpress, dark humor, satire[/tags]