Strange Day…

I have probably had over 100 e-mails today from people telling that their browser was alerting them to the fact that the blog here had “malicious code”. Here is the deal… which involves getting pretty high on the “geek meter”…

First off, rest assured there is no malicious code now on the blog, and you are perfectly safe being here.

We use a fairly complicated script to serve the ad messages here, which allow us to provide this service at no cost to you. Without the advertisers, there would be no blog.

The ad server script we use had a security hole, unknown to me, and allowed a little monkey business in our underlying code this morning. As far as we can determine, the javascript inserted did no harm to any blog user, but was enough to trip the Google bot alarm, and we were flagged. That, in turn, resulted in some browsers giving the security alert.

The latest version of the ad server script has been loaded which is clean, and at some point during the next 6 to 10 hours we should be in the clear by Google and you won’t see the browser alert again.

Most of you know we are going to relaunch the blog with a look that will be a little different, but with the same information as always. The problem today was not related to that project. Bottom line is that I need to pay more attention to the times when the scripts running the blog are updated, and I will sure commit to do that.

So hopefully tomorrow morning all will be well in blog land, with no browser alerts or any other monkey business.

Hope you are having a great weekend.

Category: Pre-November 2010 Posts