Apology for the Spam Posts

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Ene­my of Entropy. Please leave any com­ments there.

Please for­give me! I’m inves­ti­gat­ing what hap­pened, and do not expect a repeat of the incident.

I’ve been using Twit­ter Tools, a Word­Press plug-in from Alex King (a high­ly rep­utable per­son) for a month or so. I’ve had no trou­ble with it ’til now. It wasn’t con­fig­ured to post my Twit­ter mes­sages to my blog, or to post to Twit­ter when I made blog posts. Twit­ter Tools was sup­posed to dis­play a side­bar wid­get of Tweets and post a do a dai­ly sum­ma­ry of my Tweets. The dai­ly sum­ma­ry wasn’t work­ing, and I hadn’t got­ten around to fig­ur­ing out why, but oth­er­wise things were fine. Until 11:59 last night, anyway.

Since the spam didn’t hit my Twit­ter feed, I don’t think the prob­lem is with Twit­ter. If the blog itself were com­pro­mised, why would the mes­sages have been post­ed via Twit­ter Tools? So I think the secu­ri­ty hole is in Twit­ter Tools or the way Twit­ter and Word­Press work together.

In any case, pass­words have been changed all around and the plug-in has been unin­stalled. I’ll let Mr. King know about the prob­lem immediately.

Thank you for your patience. 

I espe­cial­ly appre­ci­ate the heads-up from the per­son who con­tact­ed me to let me know that there was a prob­lem. Because of my health issues, I’m not online as much as I used to be, so I wasn’t able to rec­ti­fy the prob­lem right away.

Share This