If you tried to access the site during this time, you were probably hit with a couple of 404 errors and the like.  Rest assured that all of this has been fixed and all links should work.

Thanks for your patience during this move!

I’m still sorting out the details of the hack but what I’ve gathered so far is that the hacker was able to overwrite the theme I have selected.  I believe that this is a wordpress vulnerability, but I’m looking into the posibility that it may not be.

After a quick search, another site was hit with the same exact hack.  He is also using WordPress, but he also uses the same hosting service.

The hack read “Security Z3ro” and had a weird picture (guessing middle-eastern) and played a RealMedia clip named es350.ram.  The biggest security issue was the image that it displayed.  For those of you who aren’t webmasters, any time you download anything from the internet, whether it’s a file, web page, image, movie, picture, etc, your IP address is recorded on the server.  This is done usually for statistical purposes.  But for someone who wants to wreck havoc, an IP address can be used to compromise your personal computer.

I’m guessing that the hack was taking advantage of a WP vulnerability since the attack only compromised the themes.  Upon inspection of the theme files, I noticed one of them was updated recently:

Pay particular attention to index.php.  Note the utime (update time).  Once I had the date and time, I went into my logs to see who was on my website during that time.  Thankfully, I didn’t have too many visiters at 11:30pm.  I soon found out that the hacker is either located or used a proxy server in Syria.  In either case, I can’t issue a subpoena to a foreign country to find out who did this.  But in the mean time, I have blocked his entire subnet from ever reaching my site again.

The offending IP address is 91.144.1.41.  Feel free to add this IP address to any of your filters.

The two tweets in question were placed on this past Tuesday, the 20th.  For sake of clarity, I’m including the text below:

*News you didn’t hear because of the orgy going on in DC: If you ate out recently, check your CC Bill: http://tinyurl.com/79ek9t.via Twitter – 10:15am – Comment

*A nuclear explosion can go off somewhere outside of DC and the Obamabots will continue to masterbate to his holiness. #tcot.via Twitter – 8:47pm – Comment

These tweets are no longer available on my public timeline.  Subsiquently, they have been removed from my facebook profile.

The reason these tweets are repulsive and offensive is because the imagery the tweets bring.  While this was my intention, I realize that I could have acheived a similiar reaction using a different, less abrasive, metaphor.

I deeply apologize to anyone who was offended by these choice in words.  While I cannot unring the bell, I hope that you can understand the message that I was trying to send.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.

So, please note that I will not be writing any posts on my site for the month of November. Please help me accomplish my goal by sending me encouragements or leaving comments in this story. You may follow my progress on my site. I’ll be adding a word-meter so that you can follow along.

I’m hoping by the end of this month, mikesoh.com will hold political articles and linuslive.com will hold my personal blog.

Please stay tune

In the next few weeks, the two sites will look exactly similar…with the exception of the site name of course.  The articles will even be the same.  But I’m hoping by the end of July, the seperation will be complete and mikesoh.com will host my political and editorial blogs.

So why did I decided to seperate the two?  I didn’t want to confuse the message of Christ.

Many people in fact read my blog (even though they don’t leave comments, HINT HINT).  As I’ve gotten more active politically, I’m finding it important to seperate my political articles from my spiritual articles because they both have unique tones and focuses.  This is not to suggest that my political views aren’t shaped by my beliefs.  On the contrary, I have my political views BECAUSE of my beliefs.

The focus of linuslive.com is to be more personal and reflective, verses challenging and confronting.  I felt that those voices are best heard under different venues.

Take the time now to update your bookmarks.  If you enjoy reading my personal thoughts and my bi-weekly Christian essays (crosswords), please bookmark linuslive.com.  If you want to read my political editorials and essays, continue to visit mikesoh.com.  Or, if you want both, visit both!

After much confusion, I’ve decided to split two sections of my site:

mikesoh.com will contain my political and editorial blogs.  My new site (website URL TBD) will host my personal blog entries, crossword articles, and pictures.  Both sites will run announcements.  The two sites will be incredibly different.  For one, mikesoh.com will probably run on blogger software instead of geeklog.

I’m hoping to make this change around June-July.  I’ve got to sift through a lot of articles.  I actually passed the 100 point!  Until the site is set up, please keep visiting mikesoh.com for everything!

Don’t fret!  I’m hoping to have everything finished today. 

As a result of getting so much spam a day (over 300 in fact), I will no longer be sorting through my spam folder. Any e-mails that get flagged as spam will now be automatically deleted without warning. While this may affect a minority of people that send me e-mail, I feel that the number of spam I receive and the havoc that it creates on my server outweighs the one or two e-mails that sometimes end up in my spam folder as a false positive.

You may fall into the category of affective people if you e-mail from yahoo.com, hotmail.com, or other popular web-based e-mails (gmail, for now, seems unaffected). If you are e-mailing me from one of these providers, you may prepend your subjects with "[NOT SPAM]".

If you get a reply, it means that I’ve added you to my whitelist and will no longer have to prepend your messages.

Sorry for the inconvenience folks.