Posts Tagged problem
How I restored my WordPress blog hacked by the Tunisian Hacker
Posted by admin in Announcements on October 25, 2011
I was shocked to find this afternoon that this blog was hacked! The home page was displaying the following lines with rock music playing in the background:
HacKeD By RAMZI NULL
Im Not Afraid , Because I’am Tunisian HaCKeR
Facebook ID : www.facebook.com/Ramzi.Pascal
Greetz to : Mohamed 0wNeR & All TuNiSiEN
Hotmail ID : ramzi.pascal@hotmail.fr
I spent a few hours trying to get it restored and I am reporting here what the hacker did to my blog and how I fixed the problem – hope it helps you restore your blog to normal too.
As soon as I found about this problem, I tried to change my admin login password but only to find that I could not do that! I did use the blog’s built-in feature to send me a link so that I could click and reset the password. For this I received all the emails I requested but whenever I tried to enter a new password to reset it, the blog gave me a “page not found” error. So basically I could not login as admin by resetting the password.
Then I downloaded a copy of wp-config.php to my computer via FTP and then changed the Authentication Unique Keys in it using the WordPress.com secret-key service located here – I learned from Googling that this will disable the cache and cookie on the hacker’s side immediately. This is the first thing that I should have done in the first place.
Having done that, I logged into my site’s cPanel and checked a few things around. What I found using phpMyAdmin in the MySQL database was that the hacker had added himself (ramzi) as a admin and changed me, the real admin, to a status that had a value of 0 for “user_status”!
I immediately removed this user from phpMyAdmin. After searching for user’s post by “ramzi”, I found none which means the hacker did not add any posts to the blog. Nevertheless, removing the hacker admin account did not solve the problem – the homepage still displayed his hacker page!
Then I suspected that the hacker must have done something to the theme files. So I removed the themes folder completely and then downloaded the theme file fresh and uploaded to the server - that fixed the hacked homepage!
By then only one problem remained – I could not log in as admin at all! Changing the value for “user_status” from 0 to 1 via phpMyAdmin did not help at all.
Initially I thought the hacker had tampered with files in the wp-admin folder. So I removed the wp-admin folder completely and then uploaded fresh content for that folder out of the newly downloaded WordPress zip file – no, that did not solve the problem and I still could not login.
Then I searched and found this page that really helped me to reset my admin login password using phpMyAdmin – please click the link and read the detailed instructions there.
Is your WordPress hacked in a similar fashion? Hope that you can get it fixed and I would like to hear from you how you did it.
Get Google Earth Installed and Run in Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE)
Posted by admin in Announcements on October 7, 2010
As indicated in my earlier post here, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) runs much faster than Ubuntu and any other version of Linux Mint. I really really like it. However, one thing had frustrated me for almost a week: I could not get Google Earth installed and run in LMDE.
Well, later on we found that Google Earth was indeed installed but it crashed immediately after being started. I literally tried all the installation methods I could find over the internet. I even sent the Google Earth crash report to Google. None helped me solve this problem. Then I saw someone on the Linux Mint forum mentioned about the 3D GLX Renderer issue – Google Earth needs a 3D video driver to display things properly. The command to see if the GLX Renderer is working is this command on the Linux terminal:
inxi -G
My output before Google Earth was working was this:
Graphics: Card ATI RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] X.Org 1.7.7 Res: 1360×768@60.0hz
GLX Renderer N/A GLX Version N/A
So this means that the GLX Renderer is not working at all. This is why I could not run Google Earth on LMDE and why it crashed right away after being started. THE SOLUTION?
Very simple… just use Synapitc to install a package called “libgl1-mesa-dri” – just that, nothing more! Remember to reboot your machine after installing “libgl1-mesa-dri”
If you have not installed Google Earth at all, install the “libgl1-mesa-dri” package first using Synaptic and then use the following commands to install Google Earth:
sudo apt-get install googleearth-package
sudo make-googleearth-package --force
ls (see see the exact filename for the .deb file created)
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture googleearth_x.x.xxxx.xxxx.deb (use the exact filename)
googleearth (if you see it running, then success!)
Viola! Google Earth should run in LMDE without any problem 
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