Hacked!

This morning I got a phone call from my friend, NYC illustrator Ed Steckley, who informed me my website was acting strangely. It was insisting on installing a program that his anti-virus software was jumping up and down and yelping about being a very naughty program. I couldn’t even open the website at all on my Mac.

A few e-mails to my excellent webhosts, A2Zhost.net, and it was discovered that someone hacked my blog this morning and inserted some Javascript code to require a browser to download some kind of virus, adware or spyware something or another. The folks at A2Z fixed it all up and we are once again online.

If you visited my website from about 8 am this morning until about 12:30 pm, and you clicked on any dialogue balloons asking for installing a program of some kind, please run an antivirus software scan on your computer right away. I don’t know how malicious that code was, but it isn’t something you want to have on your computer even if it is just a prank.

Apparently the hacker got access via one of my FTP accounts, which I have since deleted and probably will not use again. There are a lot of free or low cost large file transfer services that work very well from any computer that seem to be a safer solution than allowing anyone access to the files of you website. Better safe than sorry.

I apologize to anyone who is inconvenienced or ends up wasting any time as a result of this foolishness.