Trouble in Paradise

Over the last week there have been some bad happenings here at KT.  About a week ago our site was compromised and those lovely spammers/hackers/criminals had some fun leaving a few viruses and malware on our site.  We have since cleaned up their mess and locked the door they came in through.  I can tell you it is a lovely way to spend your free time.  So matters were handled and it appeared things were getting back to normal.  Guess again.  It seems Google crawled our site shortly after it was compromised and finding viruses and malware marked our site as “This Site May Harm Your Computer”!  This was discovered today.  Our traffic has all bust come to a stop because of this lovely warning and the fact that Firefox 3 which was released a week ago actually blocks an attempt to visit our site!  It not only blocks your visit it scares the pants off of you!!  It scared me and it’s my site…I was wondering if I should trust myself…

Now I am not saying that some of these measures are not good things, but I can’t help but feel that my house was broken into and the police showed up and arrested me for burglary!  Now I need to prove that I am in fact innocent.  Not a nice feeling for someone who grew up thinking you were innocent until proven guilty.  I’ve read a lot of reports of people having similar problems and quiet frankly they are mad at Google.  Personally I think what Google is doing is a good idea that is implemented poorly.  Yes the great Google got it wrong.  I think in cases like mine their service is invaluable to alerting you to the fact that you have a problem with your site.  Having dealt with these types of problem I can tell you that finding the problem is often difficult because these criminal types are good at hiding their work.  But perhaps when Google finds a problem like this they could fire off a warning email to the site owner to give them a chance to clean things up (since I doubt they even know they have a problem).  With all of Google’s resources this would not cause them any harm, it’s just a suggestion.

I’ll report back on how easy or not it is to get this scarlet letter removed from my site.  In the mean time I am going to ponder the thought that the Internet is quickly becoming a playground only for the rich and the rich corporations who can employ full time staff to catch these problems before Google does.

And to the Hackers/Spammers/Defacers/Malware-ers I hope to see you in the ring real soon…

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