Caught a Baddie

Written on June 25, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl

I was merrily posting a new entry to my personal blog this evening, when I discovered it had been infected with some malware. When I tried to look at the page, all I saw was the background image, and the status bar in Firefox showed “waiting for banished.ru”. After looking at the files on the site and not seeing anything obvious, I submitted a support ticket to my webhosting service. They got back to me right away. They claimed they couldn’t reproduce the problem, and told me to clear my cache and restart the browser (a pretty standard piece of advice, which I’ve given to lots of people myself). However, I had already done that, and tried looking at the site with a different browser, and on a different computer. They all showed the same problem.

I even tried pulling it up on my iPhone with the WiFi turned off, in case it was something that got into the router. Same symptoms. So I wrote back and the techs put a customer support rep on it. By this time, though, I had decided to start up one of the virtual machines I have on this computer, in this case WindowsXP running on Parallels. Being Windows, I keep an anti-virus program updated on that, even though it’s only a virtual machine, and being too cheap to actually pay for software to run on an Operating System I only boot up once in a blue moon, I use AVG Free. Good stuff, that. As soon as I tried to open the blog, up popped a window announcing that it had detected an infected file on the page.

I logged back into the webhost’s support page to close the ticket, and discovered their rep had also seen a javascript file that was the problem, but didn’t take the time to discover which of many I’d installed in that blog was the culprit. However, AVG Free had already told me the URI of the site that was doing bad things, and I was able to find the link with my blog theme editor. I deleted both lines of code that pointed to the offending site, restarted the blog, and there it was, as good as new.

I never thought I’d see the day when an application on Windows saved me from malware, instead of exposing me to it!

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Posted in Anti-virus, blogs, Computers, Firefox, iPhone, malware, Operating System, Software, Virtual Machine, WiFi, WindowsXP