Thanks to Register.com’s response to a phishing attack against our blog, our website, blog and e-mail were knocked off the Internet until we unraveled what happened. It seems that it’s Register.com’s policy to not inform domain name owners (like us) of phishing attacks, but rather to simply remove the domain name from their DNS servers without notification of the domain name owners! This unfortunately occurred several days after I left the United States for a 5-week trip to Cambodia and Thailand, where I was almost always without internet access. It was initially not clear whether we had a hardware problem, a T1 internet line problem, or some other problem. We apologize for any bounced e-mail during this period as well as the lack of access to our website. Fortunately, everything is once again up and running smoothly. In the phishing attack, code was injected into the Askimet plugins folder. Askimet is a spam blocker!
To prevent this type of problem in the future, we will not depend on Askimet to filter spam, and we will require moderation of all posted comments. Thanks for your understanding. We have no intention of filtering, editing, or censoring comments, other than blocking spam and preventing future phishing attacks.
We also discovered code injected into PHP files in WordPress that knocked our blog out. Arggghhh!!!! We’re hopeful that everything is back to normal and that the doors are bolted shut.
