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.
By Thomas Overbeck on 02.04.10 8:26 am
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.
By Dan on 02.04.10 9:34 am
Thomas there are several folks working on WordPress/Comicpress alternatives at Webcomics Community.
http://www.webcomicscommunity.com/
By Rob Tracy on 02.04.10 2:29 pm
[…] 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 […]
By Fleen: Home Of The Webcomics Action News Team! » Fleen Book Corner: SMILE on 02.04.10 3:27 pm
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.
By Sera on 02.04.10 6:24 pm
[…] reports of a malware-distributing hack that targets […]
By The Gigcast » Blog Archive » Webcomic Wire - 2/6/2010 on 02.06.10 6:18 pm
[…] reports of a malware-distributing hack that targets […]
By Webcomic Wire – 2/6/2010 on 02.06.10 6:19 pm
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.
By Darrell on 02.29.12 1:14 pm
The above comments are owned by whoever posted them. The staff of Fleen are not responsible for them in any way.