Site is back online

It appears that due to some stale installations of WordPress on my web hosting account, somebody managed to inject a whole bunch of garbage into the server that is running this website.

From what I can tell the initial intrusion happened in late August, while the thing that caused the site to go down happened on the morning of September 19th.

The script that ran on the machine injected files across practically every available directory on the server. It wasn’t a very subtle hack. It allowed the host to act as a ‘pass through’ – if you ever wonder why hacks these days are almost impossible to geo-locate, it is because they are almost always done through infected servers and this makes things incredibly difficult to trace after the fact.

Anyway, after many hours of polishing off my ancient UNIX skills, I’ve managed to restore this site from my backups and things should be back to normal again.

Divestor is back online – for now!

I could not imagine how anybody that doesn’t know how to navigate within an SSH session could solve this without getting external assistance (read: $$$$). Things are getting really complicated these days.

Memorable Posts – The Best of Divestor

Any long-time readers here that have long-term memories of the postings over on this website?

I’ve compiled a list of posts that I thought were exceptional pieces. Perhaps you have some additional suggestions.

Check out The Best of Divestor for this compilation and please let me know in the comments if you think anything else should be added to this list.

Apologies – Email subscriptions are now disabled

I was using WordPress plugin that is supposed to email subscribers whenever there is a new post on the site.

Unfortunately when doing some maintenance, I have been informed it has gone haywire and has sent out multiple emails to everyone of historical posts. I have since confirmed this.

This is not intended nor desirable behaviour.

I have deleted the email to subscriber plugin and have attempted to stop the emails. I have also entirely eliminated the email database that goes with this plugin. When I say I won’t be selling your email address, I really mean it!

I suggest those still interested in reading new posts to utilize the RSS feeds (https://divestor.com/?feed=rss2).

I apologize for the mass mails that were sent out. Sorry about that.