As you may (or may not! :D) have noticed, I shut down my blog briefly earlier this month. I had begun noticing some weird hits to the blog and so decided to investigate. What I discovered kind of creeped me out, but all is well now and I thought I should share my experience so that other bloggers can be aware.
It turns out that my blog was trawled by a sneaky site called 'Broken Controllers'. They redirect searches for your blog to their own website. It doesn't hurt your own blog, but if anyone uses their link to get to your site and clicks on a download button en route it can hack that persons computer. Here is a link to a blogpost that explains all of this far, far better than I can.
Anyway, I followed the instructions I found at the above linked post and emailed the broken controllers people asking them to remove my blog from their site. They did reply back that they had removed my content, so I guess that was successful. It really irks me that this kind of thing is possible, but I think since they respond pretty quickly to a removal request they are staying one step ahead of the law. Scummy people...
Now, back to business here at Willis Creek Ranch. There is a lot to catch up on! Hope I can remember the last month.... ha! :D
Thanks for the heads up!
ReplyDeleteKristine (on my browser I use exclusively for FB, so not on my google account) :D
I should clarify. There doesn't appear to be any concern about visiting here or commenting here. But, if someone were to click on the 'download' link that these scummy people direct you to when using Google or Bing to search for a blog, that is when the trouble would happen. You can find out if your blog has been trawled by these scummy people by Googling or Binging your blog name along with or without the name 'broken controllers'. They apparently love blogspot blogs. :(
ReplyDeleteLaura, what alerted you to the problem? For months I've been receiving strange emails from blogger - because I'm set to get the comments as folks post them....obviously spam and when I go to the blog or my admin site on blogger - they aren't there...but I get 3 - 10 a day. Is this sort of what was happening to you? I will do this....but wondering....I was thinking of going totally private to get rid of them as I figured something strange is going on.
ReplyDeleteDe'Etta, They aren't hidden in your spam comments area are they? I have had some comments come through my email and yet they aren't published to the blog. I finally found them in a spam comments section that I hadn't even realized existed. I deleted them. And I was glad that Blogger had identified them and kept them from being published.
DeleteWhat really got me searching was that I was seeing some odd or strange info on my Blogger Stats section and also on my Sitemeter info. Particularly, URL's that were the referring site to my blog that stood out because of their location and/or words in the URL site. I also noticed that a few of my posts were getting far more 'hits' than others for no obvious reason. I took my blog to Private for almost 2 weeks while I considered all of this. I discovered the Broken Controllers problem by searching for my blog on Bing and Google - coming up with the posts that they had linked through them. I then found that helpful blogpost that I linked above and followed those directions to get my site and content removed from Broken Controllers. That has worked. I am going to be watching those same posts and if they continue to get more hits I will probably put them back to draft form and repost them under a slightly different URL & date to break the link that others have.
I really don't like the options that Blogger gives regarding privacy. I would love to have a simple password protected blog. But, they only allow you to sign up each individual email address of each reader you will have. Ugh.
Oh well. I feel much better about things now and plan to keep the blog open. I don't want to be run off or controlled by these scum bags. But, I am going to remain vigilant and take action when needed.