The last few days have been an interesting run. There have been many search engine hits to this blog. The hits are primarily from international visitors who have searched for the /advanced_comment_system/. For this search the blog is coming up in the number one position of the Google search results. If this were a more popular keyword there would be huge traffic to the site. As it is, I have seen around 50 visitors within the last 3 or 4 days.

It would be interesting to know what has triggered the interest. Interesting indeed, a web search shows that there is a published exploit for my comment system. Further investigation indicates that I have been compromised, although this appears to be primarily an act of vandalism. I had tried to install a comment system earlier and had problems. I now find that none of the comment boxes on the sites that I have checked are working. It appears that the software can not make connection with the database. I will have to investigate further.

This was not an act of vandalism, after all. In fact, I don’t have any idea what all of the visitors are doing. The database seems to be in good order. The problem was that I had inadvertently changed a password for the database, so the software could not access the database. I had run across an article script that used a database. I had reused a user name and given it a different password, which evidently overwrote the original password. So, It was me shooting myself in the foot, rather than Kurdish bad guys or their adherents.

Tags: advanced_comment_system exploit, Google First Place SERP, Google Traffic

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under Extranious Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.