If you’re one of the approximately 50 people who regularly visit this blog — hello, both of you and your 48 increasingly suspicious friends — you may have noticed that things have been a little quiet around here recently.
Or, depending on when you visited, not quiet at all.
Instead of the usual updates about life, work, Afghanistan, Nepal, travel and whatever else we happen to be rambling about, you may have been confronted with something rather different.
Casinos.
Lots and lots of casinos.
Greek casinos. Dutch casinos. Online casinos. Betting sites. Poker. And, quite possibly, some other considerably more dubious things that neither of us wrote, approved, endorsed, recommended, understood, or particularly wanted anywhere near our website.
We were hacked.
And apparently whoever hacked us decided that our modest little corner of the internet was precisely what the international online gambling industry had been waiting for.
By the time we worked out quite how extensive the problem was, more than 2,000 spam posts had been published on the site.
Two. Thousand.
For context, this blog normally attracts somewhere around 50 readers. So whoever did this was producing casino-related content at a rate of approximately 40 unwanted articles per actual reader.
This seems excessive.
More seriously, though, we want to apologise.
If you visited the site during this period and saw strange posts, were redirected somewhere you didn’t expect, encountered advertising or other dubious content, or received anything apparently associated with this website that concerned or embarrassed you, we are genuinely sorry.
None of that content came from us and none of it was under our control. We certainly weren’t quietly pursuing a new career as online gambling influencers.
We don’t yet know exactly how long the site had been compromised. That’s one of the slightly unnerving things about this sort of attack: for quite a while, everything can look perfectly normal when you’re logged in and maintaining the site, while visitors may be seeing something very different.
Eventually the whole thing rather spectacularly fell over, which is when we discovered just how much had been going on behind the scenes.
And what a mess.
There were mysterious administrator accounts. Malicious plugins masquerading as legitimate ones. Hidden files. Thousands of fake posts. Things buried in places where things really shouldn’t be buried. At one point we discovered an administrator called simply “bot”, which at least deserves some credit for not wasting anybody’s time with an elaborate cover identity.
Another had managed to publish 144 articles.
I have never been that productive in my life.
The good news is that the casino empire has now been evicted. More than 2,000 rogue posts have been removed, the suspicious accounts have gone, and we’re having the website professionally cleaned to make sure that the less obvious nasties hiding underneath are removed as well.
That’s also why there hasn’t been a proper update from us for a while. We decided it was probably better not to add new material while we were still discovering quite how thoroughly somebody else had been adding theirs.
Once everything has been checked, cleaned and secured, normal service will resume.
Or at least what passes for normal service around here.
So if you’ve been wondering where we’ve been: we’re still here. We’ve just spent rather more time than anticipated dismantling an enormous, unsolicited international casino operation.
And if you happened to visit during the chaos and wondered whether Phil and Pratiksha had undergone a dramatic career change…
No.
Definitely not.
Although given the amount of material they published, I’m slightly disappointed nobody sent us a share of the profits.
Normal rambling will resume shortly.
