Blogging from the Highlands of Scotland
'From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step' - Diderot

Friday 30 August 2013

An addendum to my article yesterday about 'malware'

In the update to my article yesterday, I mentioned that the source of the 'malware' which had infected this blog (and which has now been eliminated), was a link to a blog from Zimbabwe which had been inactive for some time and which I had not removed. In fact, I think the reason the 'malware' got into my blog was not the link to that blog per se, but its inclusion in a separate part of my blog-lists designed to highlight blogs which had recently been updated, which obviously required each blog included there to be visited ('looked-up') to check whether it had indeed been updated recently; as part of my 'cleansing' process I have therefore eliminated this utility completely and will not be reinstating it. As I had the same 'blogs recently updated' utility installed in my other Spanish blog as well, it has been eliminated there too, even though the offending Zimbabwean blog was not included there, as it seems to me that particular utility is a potential risk.

In addition, apart from probably needlessly replacing my customised blog template with a standard blogger templated (as part of my initial frantic efforts to identify where the 'malware' had hidden itself), one other action I have taken is to remove all my blog entries relating to Zimbabwe, because many of my earlier such articles relied upon articles which had been written in the now inactive offending blog. Over the 11+ years my blog has been in existence there were about 64 such articles - this is a pity, but I felt I had to take this action to eliminate so far as possible any future risk to the operational integrity of the coding of this blog.

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