Fighting the good fight!

Alright, I think the worst is behind us. I owe everyone an explanation.

I’m not the patriotic type, but the events of last week have definitely brought out my American pride. We fought a hack attack from Russian hackers. The hackers didn’t target this blog alone. There are other websites hosted where this little thing I do for fun is hosted, and the hack was widespread across the whole server. It turns out that mine was most affected because it gets the most traffic.

So after an aggressive attack on Thursday, MetalFrog, who does lots of behind the scenes things for this blog, worked long and hard to restore service on Thursday evening. I even put together a brief explanation along with the weekly Jersey Shore Recrap, sort of celebrating the victory.

It was premature.

I don’t yet have the full details, but it looks like the Russian hackers exploited a bug in a WordPress plugin, WPTouch, which adds the ability to covert the theme of the blog to a stripped down mobile theme when accessed on a cellular device or tablet, and was able to aggressively attack the server, redirect things, and change permissions so that killing it didn’t work. It turns out Google de-listed this blog because it was flagged as malware, and those of you using Google Chrome weren’t able to visit because Chrome gives an alert for sites that are flagged as malware.

It was a mess.

Let me tell you: MetalFrog worked his ass off trying to get this thing under wraps. Everything is now disinfected, and Google has now reviewed things and has re-listed me. You can see that everything is hunky dory by looking at the entry for derryX.com on Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic page.

It’s business as usual as far as content goes this week. Before things got strange at the end of the week, you might have missed a few posts, here’s a list in case you want to catch up:

• I won’t catch you if you fall…
• derryX Dines: City Beer Hall – Albany, NY
• Venison pie with sweet potato topping
• derryX Dines: Churrascaria Plataforma (Extra special!)
• Jersey Shore – Season 6 Episode 8 Recrap

That wasn’t all that was going on last week.

Halo 4 launched on Tuesday. That leads into an update on UPS blunders. Yes, after months of perfect deliveries, the UPS delivery man decided to blooper up on this shipment. But that’s a story for another day. As is the story about how awesome Halo 4 is; it’s been a while since I’ve done a post about video games (because it’s been a while since I’ve played video games), so it’ll be a fun post.

Last week was also the fallout of Hurricane Sandy. Fortunately, the area in which I live was minimally affected. Jersey City, however, is screwed…still. That includes my beloved WFMU, which is struggling to raise funds to remain operating after the damage caused by the hurricane. If you’re not familiar with WFMU, please read their wikipedia entry, and understand that something like this going away is a very bad thing. If you have the means, please think about donating to WFMU.

The next few weeks should be interesting.

There’s some info coming soon about a public derryX Dines event. I also have some details about a cooking class I might be teaching in the near future. And one big thing coming is some insight on the seasonal changes coming to a menu at a local restaurant. That’s all in addition to how things usually go. Ohh, and there are some holidays in between there.

I appreciate everyone’s support. If you notice anything suspicious, please let me know. And don’t be afraid to use the buttons at the bottom of each post to share what you see here with your friends. The audience of this thing has reached new heights because of the social aspect of it, so let’s keep that going!