AFP Was Hacked

Sandman was on last night prepping his review for the Marvel Universe Masterworks Galactus (with some absolutely stunning photographs that should go up on Monday morning) but the AFP galleries were acting strangely. So I checked out the site and found that some malicious code had been inserted into the software that runs AFP.

A quick call to our host, GoDaddy.com, cleared up the problem. Apparently there was a widespread attack on sites hosted there, so they had a script that they ran, and in a couple of minutes, close to 800 files that were affected were cleaned up. So while I’m not happy that there was a vulnerability at GoDaddy, and even less pleased that they didn’t proactively alert their customers, I’m relieved that they were able to resolve it easily and quickly.

The code was a simple redirect script that would randomly take you to another site instead of AFP. If you were visiting yesterday, you may have been alerted by your browser that the site you were visiting contained malware. I was assured by our host that since we’re not an e-commerce site, none of our visitors’ information would be compromised – but if you did try to stop by here yesterday and mysteriously ended up someplace else, please run a virus scan on your computer just to make sure. I use Avast and Ad-Aware, two excellent scanners that are free, and my computer is clean.

Sorry for the inconvenience – I hope this doesn’t deter you visiting us again.