Query to those who read Murketing via RSS: pr0n-spam problems?

Posted by Rob Walker on November 24, 2008
Posted Under: Murketing.com

A friend of the site who reads via NetNewsWire dropped me a line yesterday to say that a whole bunch of unsavory terms (and, he pointed out, at least one line from Shakespeare) were appearing at the end of the Murketing feed — some sort of porn-spam thing.

I keep an eye on my own feed via a different reader, so I hadn’t been aware of this, and nobody else has mentioned it.

Are those of you reading via RSS seeing anything similar?

Apparently this might be one explanation. My tech team (which is me) is looking into the matter, but if you have anything to report, please let me know, it will help my troubleshooting greatly. Thanks!

And obviously, apologies and so on if anything in the feed was jarringly offensive lately. (I mean anything outside of my actual posts, which I realize can be offensively lame, but that’s different.)

Further diversion may be found at MKTG Tumblr, and the Consumed Facebook page.

Reader Comments

All is fine here with the Google reader.

#1 
Written By Lisa @ Corporate Babysitter on November 24th, 2008 @ 12:00 pm

Nothing weird on my Bloglines reader either.

#2 
Written By Amy on November 24th, 2008 @ 3:25 pm

I use NetNewsWire as well, and I haven’t seen anything like that.

#3 
Written By joel on November 24th, 2008 @ 3:55 pm

no problems reading in netvibes.com here

#4 
Written By paul on November 25th, 2008 @ 2:56 am

A) I didn’t see it but B) I have spoken to a few people about some problems they’ve been facing recently with spam implanted in their WordPress/PHP sites (I’ve had a bit of trouble myself). Though I haven’t been able to confirm it’s the reason, my suspicion is that there is some sort of issue with custom themes in WordPress that leaves them vulnerable. Will let you know if I figure anything out, but generally I would poke around your WordPress files and see if you see anything odd (also look at invisible files in the folders of your theme — that’s where I found the files hidden for a friend of mine).

#5 
Written By Noah Brier on November 28th, 2008 @ 1:16 am

rob

i had the exact same problem. someone hacked into my admin account on wordpress and was adding the code into drafted or already-published posts. the weird thing was that it only appeared in the rss feed, not the main site.

if you’re using wordpress i’d upgrade, and then check your posts to see if any of your user accounts have modified the posts where the spam is appearing. when i checked the admin account my web designer created, it had been “modifying” posts left and right, adding code. so i just deleted the count and, knock on wood, haven’t had the problem since.

grace

#6 
Written By grace on November 29th, 2008 @ 11:24 am

Thanks for the reports. and Noah & Grace, thanks for the advice. I’m still troubleshooting but have upgraded WP now and still poking around. Puzzling. Anyway thanks all!

#7 
Written By Rob Walker on December 1st, 2008 @ 7:29 am
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