Near Death Experience

May 22, 2010 Hunter Wallace Blogging 37

OD was hacked this afternoon. We successfully cleaned out the database. I trashed the old WordPress, installed the latest version, and connected it to a fresh backup. Everything seems in order. Thank God.

We’re still having problems with the forum. The database and files are still there. It is just a matter of cleaning up the mischief. All the authors and administrators need to change their passwords as soon as possible.

I’m going to spend the next few days tightening up security around here. Talk about a baptism by fire. It was inevitable that this would happen sooner or later. As this site grows and becomes more influential, I expect we will come under attack more frequently.

I owe Matt Parrott and Samuel Phillips a debt of gratitude. Without their help, I doubt we could have recovered from this.

Note: There is a bright side to this nightmare. I managed to update the WordPress software for the first time in two years!

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

37 Comments

  1. I am glad OD has seen again the light at the end of the NDE. Just curious, has TOQ Online also been hacked or is it just maintenance?

  3. Why didn’t you update WordPress software in two years? Updated versions always offer superior security protection. It’s probably why OD was easy to hack.

  4. Hunter glad you are back online.

    At first I thought you were crushed by the Great Firewall of China and then thought you were hacked.

    Keep up the good work,
    Sherwood Smith
    South China

  5. I’m ignorant about computers, but is it possible to put the numbers in front of each comment again? It’s really convenient for sorting out the multiple dialogues that sometimes take place.

    • The comments are now nested, or threaded, rather than numbered.
      As Matt says, this format has its advantages and disadvantages; Alternative Right integrates nested comments quite well into their online presentation.

      It is nice to see a reply directly under the post to which it’s addressed, regardless of the duration of time between the two posts, so that you needn’t scroll up to reference replies stipulated by number; however, said numbering has obvious advantages as well, and we’ve always used it here.

      Unfortunately, WordPress has completely eliminated comment numbering from the current version of its software, to which we recently upgraded. Even if the nesting feature is disabled, the numbers will not reappear. I tried.

      Embrace your nesting instinct.

  6. And the irony is that our hacker’s ilk likes to accuse us of being nazis craving to censor dissent.

    Congratulations with your great work on this website, Hunter Wallace. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute and the contributions you have made. I also feel relieved you were able to save this website; I was very worried, when the screen displayed the unavailable, BRB message.

    Together, all of us at Occidental Dissent will defeat the traitors of our race! The White Race Traitors will fall like the elites of the Roman Empire did. 🙂

  7. You’re going to have more problems like this as you become more prominent. At the very least, you need to keep wordpress, your database, and your operating system up to date to counter this.

    WordPress isn’t exactly renowned for its security anyway.

  8. Good optimism, Daniel. Believing it’s going to happen is an important step that many people miss. The Pentagon came up with a term, “mindwar,” that differs with my coinage of the term, but is relevant to us as well, and, now that I read it further, I can see that our enemies have practiced exactly this brand of “pentagon mindwar” psyops on us through mass media, the “overwhelming with argument.” However, it has not worked on all of us, and now it’s our turn to take up “Mind-War,” Kievsky style.

    – by –
    Colonel Paul E. Valley
    Commander
    – with –
    Major Michael A. Aquino
    PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader

    Headquarters, 7th Psychological Operations Group
    United States Army Reserve
    Presidio of San Francisco, California
    1980
    MindWar reverses this sequence. Psychological means for achieving victory –
    essentially through convincing the enemy that he really wants to bring his national policies
    into harmony with ours – are fashioned in support of basic political goals. The use of
    “ordinary” military force (bombs, bullets, etc.) is regarded as a “last resort” in
    circumstances wherein MindWar by itself fails.
    1
    Later Major General, USAR.
    2
    The term “MindWar” was coined by another PSYOP officer, Colonel Richard Sutter, and myself in 1977. After seeing the
    recent film Star Wars, we played with a modification of its name as a futuristic replacement for the somewhat bland Army
    designation “Psychological Operations”. An avowedly science-fictional treatment of MindWar, complete with a caricature of
    Sutter at its helm, appears in my Star Wars story The Dark Side, available at http://www.xeper.org/maquino
    -3-
    The advantage of MindWar is that it conducts wars in nonlethal, noninjurious, and
    nondestructive ways. Essentially you overwhelm your enemy with argument. You seize
    control of all of the means by which his government and populace process information to
    make up their minds, and you adjust it so that those minds are made up as you desire.
    Everyone is happy, no one gets hurt or killed, and nothing is destroyed.

    • Kievsky, could you provide some links to that “mindwar” stuff? I’d like to comp “their” thinking with what you are coming up with. Constructively, of course! Thanks.

    • Then ask for help and upgrade. Several conveniences and increased security would double your viewership – IMHO.

  10. I’m not familiar with this version of WordPress. There are several plugins I have to update. I don’t know why the numbers in front of comments disappeared.

    • I don’t know why the numbers in front of comments disappeared.

      Yes, the other format was way better than this one, and it was easier and more aesthetically pleasing to read — and keep a more engaging thread conversation going.

      Hunter – see if you can get the numbered comment system back — without the ‘reply’ option — which can muck things unecessarily up.

      Thanks,
      -Kulak

    • The answer to your question is answered, or at the very least addressed by Matt Parrott here

      You know how these comments are actually INSIDE of the comments they’re replying to? Previously, OD had the generic “flat” style in which none of the coments are nested. Some sites go with this style, which has its pros and cons. Alt.Right uses the nested comments.

  12. I clicked on a normal Google link to Occidental Dissent a few weeks ago, and found myself at a website called the Jewish Something Something, when I tried navigating away it set off what I thought was a legitimate Windows/Avast warning, when I tried again to navigate away I was hit by a nasty piece of malware(?) advertising that luckily had been identified by my Windows Defender, after going through my files offline for some hours, I was able find and delete the malware(?) advertising file.

    This may have been just a case of Jews being Jews and trying a hard sell on the computer user, or it may have been something more sinister. Holding someone’s computer hostage until you buy their product is really Jewish. Reminds me of an old Jew who wouldn’t let me out of his store until I bought something when I was a kid. LOL.

    Windows Defender is pretty good.

    • TW – this is a Russian-Jew mafia operation. He/it has gotten into my computer 3X now, held it hostage, and I had to call a local expert to root it out. He said their HQ is in Russia, have it in for Gates and microsoft, and attack at regular intervals. They even send taunting e-mails.

  13. Don’t mind me, I’m just testing out what the right html tags are.

    [b]Test[/b]
    Test

    [i]Test[/i]
    Test

    [u]Test[/u]
    Test

    [quote]Test[/quote]

    Test

    Test

  14. I’ve never liked nested comments much. With flat threads, you know right where the latest comment went. With nested? WTF knows?

  18. Ok, so the quote didn’t work. Anyway, what I wanted to say was this: is there anybody else who find this sentence scary:

    “Everyone is happy, no one gets hurt or killed, and nothing is destroyed.”

    Everyone is happy; that’s right, keep drinking that kool-aid… non-lethal weapons, nothing to see here, just keep on droning along… nauseating, really.

  19. Forgot to click on the darn “reply”. This was a reply to Kievsky’s piece on the AR mindwar thing. *sigh* These new-fangled ideas. Hammer and chisel was sooo much easier…

  20. Seems like some comments are gone from older threads. For instance the one on the lack of Protestants on the Supreme Court shows over 300 comments (there was that long discussion about the relative merits of WASPS and other White ethnic groups, and their relative guilt in the destruction of America) now only about a dozen show up.

    Also, I maybe wrong about this, but didn’t we weren’t the comments numbered previously? That’s a very useful feature for a place like this where people are trying to have substantive discussions under a topic and the comments grow to the hundreds. Perhaps the feature was lost in the upgrade, but might be re-enabled in the setup flles?

  21. The forum works in Firefox but the blog itself does not, there’s some sort of configuration/headers problem still.

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