Posts Tagged ‘pharma hack’

The Wren’s Nest Conquers the Pharma Hack, We’re Pretty Sure

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One of the reasons our blog here at the Wren’s Nest has been relatively quiet is the dreaded “pharma hack.” This blog procured it a while back. It has been a thoroughly obnoxious experience.

The pharma hack is a virus that attacks WordPress based blogs. Its symptoms turn up in search engines, giving posts the appearance of spammy pharmaceutical advertisements. It even finds its way into your RSS Feeds.

(Related, you should subscribe to our RSS Feed. It’s painless and now disease free!)

The pharma hack is one of the stupidest things I know about. I am disgusted just typing its name. The good news is that it’s (mostly) gone now. Here’s how we got rid of it:

1. Tim, a gentleman and scholar over at Baby Got Books, pointed out the problem.
2. A few minutes of research led to this extremely helpful post on how to rid yourself of the pharma hack.
3. The wonderful people at Lampe-Farley Communications rolled up their sleeves and got busy combing through our code. (Even with instructions, it’s not an easy fix.)
4. We waited for Google et al to crawl our site to ensure that the pharma hack isn’t turning up anymore. The less popular posts aren’t scanned as often, so some posts still appear hacked.

It’s been a terribly unnecessary and time-consuming experience. In addition to those named above, I would like to thank some very well-timed beers for helping us beat the pharma hack.

The morals of this story: (a) if you have a WordPress blog, make sure that it’s updated; (b) if you have the pharma hack do not seek antibiotics! Instead, seek out this glorious post at Pearsonified.