Things are back to normal

Just in case you are wondering what that strange sound is coming from northern Connecticut  . . . it’s me cheering because the problem with my blog http://www.quillingwithwhimsiquills.blogspot.com/ has been resolved. I started this blog because so many quillers were contacting me with questions about teaching, framing, matting, selling their work etc. that I thought the blog would be a way to put all of that information out there for anyone who might be interested. I’ve put up 78 posts with reference materials and features I’ve done on other quillers; including pictures of their work and links to other quillers, my web site, and free patterns etc. I’ve had such a wonderful response to the blog so naturally I was devastated when that warning popped up. Thankfully some of my readers alerted me to the problem right away. Then the whole nightmare process of figuring out “what went wrong” began. I thought I would share this with you just in case you ever find yourself in this position.

When I saw the RED warning at the top of my blog (which is hosted by Google), I was directed to Webmaster Tools. The web master tools suggested that my site was “suspicious” and might contain “malware”. Unfortunately, Google didn’t tell me where the offending malware was located on my blog. I went through all of the comments and did find one that was “strange”, I deleted it immediately; but that did not solve the problem. Google suggested that I quarantine my blog, but I was unable to learn exactly how to do that.  I did end up getting professional help because I was so “lost” trying to clear the whole thing up (after all, I am a quilling artist NOT a computer expert). After much research, I found a site called http://www.unmaskparasites.com/  Google had made references to them in several of its “help” articles and apparently they have been written up in several computer magazines. They did a  ”security report” which rated every link on my site and found the culprit. I then ran www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic/site= for the offending site, and sure enough it told me that this site was hosting malicious software which had allowed it to act as intermediary for the infection of 37 other sites (including mine). I have deleted all references/links to that site which apparently had also been “hacked” by another site which had infected more than 1800 sites. I will now run any links through Google’s safe browsing diagnostic before I put it up on my site. I have contacted the other quiller who was hacked to let her know what has happened. I can’t even tell you how many hours I spent on this problem, but the good news is that no one else was affected; the offending link has been removed and Google has given the “all clear”.  Now I can get back to writing about quilling!