The Korean Hacker Scandal

(Or What happened to Crotchmail)

Many of you may have noticed that Crotchmail went down for several weeks, and that it was officially “Banned by Google” for that duration as well. Why? Psychotic Korean Hackers gone nuts on my website! No really.

It all started when I fired up my computer one day, and got some strange emails from this blog that weren’t generated by me… Then I realize that I can’t send emails because I’ve gone over my 300/day quota, WTF?

I quickly jumped into action, where jumping and action means, typing crotchmail.com into my web browser. Where I was immediately met with a huge red warning sign, that is a new FEATURE of firefox 3, which means that when your site is listed as harmful by google, it is literally blocked. I had to accept a dialog box to get onto my site. Which immediately tried to dump viruses and malware onto my computer.

I quickly replaced the affected files, but to no avail. Then I did some research with IP addresses and found out that basically I had been hacked by someone in Korea (or Mars) who had used a security flaw in WordPress to skullfuck my website and inject it with dirty web-STD’s. Then my site was used like a portugese whore to spread the vicious evil around the internet.

After GoDaddy claimed they could do nothing to help me, and Google simply requested that I ‘fix the problem‘ it was up to me to correct all this crap. However this required me to change my passwords, reinstall my blogging software, pour through hundreds of pages of code and to do a tribal rain dance on a twister board, covered in the blood of the first born son of a couple who have both had opposing sex changes.

After all this my patient appeared dead, like an injured soldier who has had too many surgeries I was unable to resuscitate. But with the help of my friend Anton and Brendan I gained some additional insight which eventually led me to getting things back on track. Which for your information, involved forcing my way into the admin panel and changing to a different template because my current one was permanently f***ed.   After that I had to re-sync up with my SQL database. Does this sound like utter nonsense to you? Well then you’re lucky.

Long story short, I had to do a long song and dance to get my site back up and running and had I been one iota less of a genius I could have lost all my articles, and the world would forever be a shittier place. The internet would be like detroit… that’s right DETROIT.

– Adam

CrotchMail.com