The webcomics blog about webcomics

Supplementary Post On Today’s Unpleasantness

Karl Kerschl writes to tell us that the malware-distributing hack to The Abominable Charles Christopher is sorted out. He also tells us that he’s received news that a WordPress/ComicPress-targeting hack may be making the rounds. It’s not clear yet how serious this is, but since ComicPress is pretty much the dominant ecosystem for self-hosted webcomics, it would have the potential to really abuse our community.

Like we said before, it’s never a bad time to doublecheck your versions, make sure your backups are current (it’s my understanding that a WordPress XML backup is safe from the risk of accidentally carrying over nastyware), and update anything that needs updating. Many thanks to Kerschl for doing his bit to make this a teachable moment.

This is one of the reasons why I never liked the virtual monopoly that WordPress seems to have over the webcomic community. If someone can come up with a good alternative for another CMS (like Drupal, Xoops, Geeklog, etc.) I would be willing to try it.

The hack may be sorted out to some degree, but I still can’t access the site because my virus scanner still registers it as infected.

Thomas there are several folks working on WordPress/Comicpress alternatives at Webcomics Community.

http://www.webcomicscommunity.com/

[…] couple of comments in the followup to yesterday’s story of Karl Kerschl’s woes. ComicPress is a terrific product, but as a dominant player, it runs the risk of monocultures […]

Another alternative – find someone to code your site/learn how to do it yourself. I’d wager 2% of ComicPress-hosted sites actually do any sort of major customization/look unique, the rest of them use the system because they can’t be bothered to figure out how to use a script to make an archive.

Too frustrating.

[…] reports of a malware-distributing hack that targets […]

[…] reports of a malware-distributing hack that targets […]

My ComicPress site was just attacked with malware as well. Not sure how it got in yet. May never know. WordPress was just upgraded too. A real drag.

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