We’re back on line after a skin-crawling attack that exploited the WordPress installation to rebrand the oklo.org name as synonomous with the latest in spamware. I noticed the problem yesterday morning, and took the site offline. Buried in the WordPress .php scripts, I found a piece of code that looked like this:
Luckily, the MySQL database seems to have been unaffected, so I did an rm -rf * and started from scratch with the latest WordPress.
It’s been a rather apocalyptic-themed week: Russian hackers attack oklo.org, the University of California is disentigrating under the weight of repeated budget cuts, and on Tuesday, I went to Los Angeles to film a segment for a History Channel episode describing how the Earth would fare in the sudden absence of human presence. My particular interview focused on what would happen to the geostationary satellites over a timescale of weeks to months to years. The filming was done at an abandoned hospital, which was one of the creepiest places I’ve ever seen.
Welcome back!
Coincidentally, I went to Jonathan Tan (the professor I TA for) yesterday afternoon to show him the Console for an extra credit assignment I planned for the students in his class, only to find oklo had 404’d.
Was the backend affected by the hack or is it down for maintenance?
Every time I have tried to access the backend website (I have been trying to access it since I discovered Oklo.org a few weeks ago) I have either got nowhere or ‘scareware’ appeared.
Backend is down for maintenance. We’re doing a complete overhaul, and it should be back online fairly soon.