My Blog Was Hijacked

Friday, March 9

My Blog Was Hijacked

Well this being my first blog and my love to play with all the neat tools at Google lead me down a path that ended in great failure. I ended up hijacking my own blog within Google and Gwelf.com was transformed into 404 error page.

It freaked me out, had to give some engineers at Google an after hours call but within 4 hours they called me back with a working solution. Leave it to me to find a flaw within the wonderful world of Blogger, I guess they took Blogger out of BETA a little too soon.

I won’t comment on how exactly I hijacked the blog as at present Google hasn’t been able to fix this problem within its system and they’ve taken my case into a private support group. Lucky for me, Google was able to fix my problem as I was both the hacker and the blog owner, had I only been the blog owner then the engineers at Google wouldn’t have been able to help and it would have gotten even more messy involving Google account managers.

The reason for Google’s and my non-public disclosure on this is there are at present 34,361 websites that are vulnerable and generally the web is full of great people but give just a few the power to cause problems and we might just see 30,000+ more AdSense websites spring up overnight, or worse 30,000+ websites all selling “blue pills”.

So I send big thanks out to Jonathan and the rest of the engineering team at Google for helping get access back to my blog and if anyone here has had their blog hijacked and is looking for the solution please contact Google directly, you can reference my blog Gwelf.com and its case file #121996221. If there is no reply from Google, please feel free to contact me and I will send you the steps needed to regain control of your blog.

0 comments:

Related Posts