A Magical Evening of File Searching

On Thursday afternoon, a hacker (or perhaps a whole room full of the chaos-loving fiends) managed to infect GameBanshee with hundreds of files that were redirecting visitors to what Google defines as an “attack site”. Tracking down all of the problem areas across our entire file system was no easy task, but thanks to some help from our hosting provider, the problem appears to be behind us.

I’m still going to have to figure out what led to the compromise in the first place, and then I’ll have to go through a review process with Google in order to have the site taken off the unsafe list (this can be summed up as nothing short of awesome, given the fact that the site has been “safe” for over 10 years). Until the latter happens, you may or may not receive a warning while browsing the site. Even if you ignore the warning, Firefox refuses to load our entire layout, which means that your browsing experience may be less than stellar if that’s your browser of choice.

In any event, I’d like to extend my deepest apologies to anyone who ended up getting redirected to the darkest, most insidious reaches of the web, and to those of you who couldn’t check out our news or other articles without running into a roadblock or three. The whole situation is a lose/lose for everyone.

Anyway, it’s late, and I have to get my kids ready for school in 5 hours. May the unscrupulous hacker(s) responsible for the downtime, my massive headache, and many hours of lost work die a miserable, lonely, and painful death. Thanks for listening.