Hi Michael, This from Stan Hirson <http://pineplainsviews.com/> at Artists in the Cloud:
*'There have been widespread reports of site hacks on Dreamhost lately and while most of my sites are functioning with little damage seen to the public, they have been hacked. I am not a programmer, but am relatively computer-literate and I am dismayed by Dreamhost's haughty response both in the forums and in support robot correspondance to me.* *Whatever the outcome for Michael and Doron, I hope that their experience will be shared.* *From what I can tell, there are many possible explanations for various hacks. Some may have come from a prior security breach at Dreamhost, some from an infected version of PHP (how the hell to switch to a good one is beyond me), corrupt htaccess files (uggh, I am afraid to open that up without doing more damage) and outdated Wordpress plugins. But the professional unix and c programmers are using this as an excuse to publicly preen and DH support does not seem sensitive to many of its users. * *I asked for a restore from a backup and was told by a robot with a robotic sense of humor that there was none....* *I have stuck with Dreamhost for many years, but this may get me to switch!* *Whatever happens, I will share a possible solution with this list. I think there are probably a lot of other folks with the same problems.* *Stan* ** ** ** ** ** ** And this from Michael Verdi <http://michaelverdi.com/> at Artists in the Cloud:** *This is called the Pharma Hack. I've had this and fixed it but it is a really time consuming procedure. I followed the instructions here ** http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php*<http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php> * to get rid of it. I found that I had to repeat these instructions about 3 times. The issue is you may think you've gotten it all but you can't be sure. So you have to wait for Google to re-crawl your site which can take about a week. If you still have drug ads in your results, try again. Once you've fixed it, you'll want to prevent it from happening again. These steps ** http://www.wptavern.com/top-5-wordpress-security-tips-you-most-likely-dont-follow *<http://www.wptavern.com/top-5-wordpress-security-tips-you-most-likely-dont-follow> * along with being vigilant about installing Wordpress updates should do it. The other thing to note about updates is that you should limit yourself to actively developed themes and plugins. The default Wordpress theme and Askimet plugins are good bets. That doesn't mean you can't customize the look of the site. Just limit it to the theme's customization options and possibly an extra css file.* Robert.
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