BurglerI have a blog that I started about a year and a half ago. This blog was an experiment so I used an alias and never associated it with any of my other blogs. I only made about 5 or 6 blogpost on it and forgot all about it. The weird thing about that blog is that the topic is one that is very search traffic friendly, so those few blog post kept a little bit of Adsense clicking traffic coming in. For that reason, I never shut it down and keep telling myself I’m going to go back to blogging on that site.

For that blog, I created a Google alert. I do that with all my blogs. Even though I haven’t blogged, nor visited that blog in over a year, I get an alert from Google for that blog about 2 or 3 times a week, which I usually ignore. About 4 or 5 months ago, I got a bunch of alerts for that blog and decided to see what it was all about and checked it out. What I found was that I was getting a lot of links to my blog for post that I didn’t write. When I went to my blog, I didn’t see those post, but the URLs were always in the links. That’s when I noticed all of those URS’s were “.html” which I should never see since I have a wordpress blog. So I copied and pasted the url that was in the alert into my browser and it indeed took me to a page that was at my domain with spam. I logged into my host server and found a folder with a ton of “html” pages filled with spam. I never figured out how it happened but I’m thinking there was a security hole in the version of Wordpress I was using at the time I created that blog.

I deleted all of those files and upgraded wordpress to a higher version.

Have you ever seen that happen to your blog?

Ok if you are familiar with the directory tree within a wordpress site, you’d know that there is a folder called “wp-content”. In that folder was another folder called simply “1″. That folder is where all of those “.HTML” spam pages were stored. When I looked at that folder, that is where I found every one of those URLs that were listed in the Google alerts that I was getting. So I deleted them. and if you find anything like that, you should delete them also, delete the whole “1″ folder.

That’s not it,  hackers were having a field day with that blog. I’ll get into the second part of this problem I had tomorrow.