The American Jerk

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.

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UPDATE: The upgrade is complete and all passwords related to the Web site have been changed and hardened, which looks like not only a functional success,  but outside tools are confirming that the “infection” has been eliminated. Following The American Jerk’s RSS links in your favorite aggregator should be safe once again. If only herpes was so easy to kill.

Thanks again to Timmy Mac for looking out for me… unlike that time he poured cheap bourbon down my throat and convinced me that the chick in the “All Sex Is Rape” t-shirt was totally checking me out.

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Many thanks to my buddy Timmy Mac who advised me that it looked like The American Jerk has been hacked to redirect RSS Subscription links to wretched spammer sites, despite my protestations that he was the drunken idiot who probably clicked on Bonsai Buddy or some such nonsense.

I’ve cleaned up the internal, womanly plumbing as best I can, but I’ll be spending the next several hours cursing and wailing my way through a WordPress upgrade to try to alleviate future problems.

If the site goes down, or if you flat-out don’t want to risk being redirected if the problem returns, you can follow The American Jerk’s Twitter Feed for both updates on the upgrade, and as a half-assed subscription source to find out when new posts are up.

Please bear with me as I turn a perfectly good humor magazine into the computer equivilant of a Superfund Site.