What’s going on? Short answer – your Wordpress account has been hacked.

More than likely you have been running an old version (ie not the current one) and you have succumbed to an exploit.

The two telling signs is that you have two administrator users (one that ou cannot see), and that your permalink structure has changed. There are other things as well but they are the two main ones.

More detailed discussion can be read about it here.

First and foremost, you should be making sure you have a backup of all your files and SQL database (it should be a regular thing anyway!) before making any changes.

Note: All care but no responsibility is taken with the accuracy of this post.

To find the hidden user, go to the /wp-admin/users.php page and click the link near the top of the page to view only Administrators. The page will not show the hidden administrator, but you can “view source” of this page, and you’ll find the additional username somewhere in the HTML. The key thing to find is the user id, which then can be used with the following URL (substituting the hacker’s user id for xx):

http:///wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=xx

Once you’re in the page to edit the user, you can change its role back to ‘Subscriber’ and delete the bogus ‘first name’ field. (Also you’ll have to insert an email address so that you can save your changes – just enter any old email address) After saving the changes, return to the normal user list, and select this user and delete it.

Upgrade your Wordpress to the latest version, and don’t forget to change your permalink structure. I would also suggest changing your admin password, and having a read of this page to consider other actions to secure your wordpress install.

Finally, thanks to the guys at NachoTech. The post there helped me sort out and fix my WP issues without any loss of data.

Why do I always see MD5 next to a file when I’m about to download? What do I need to do with it?Is it important?

MD5 (Message digest 5) is used for a variety of things, but what you are probably interested in is that it can be used to verify the integrity of a file.

Why would you want to do that? Well, to see if the orginal file has been altered in any way (eg malicious code intserted into it etc).

How does it work?

Download the file as well the the MD5 has key (which will be a long string of numbers)
Grab a MD5 checker (such as the one here), and paste the MD5 key into this as well as point the checker to your downloaded file.
The checker will tell you whether the MD5 matches ie. you have an unaltered file. Simple!

Oh, for all you nerds that want to know more about MD5, have a read of RFC1321

Wouldn’t it be great to have a one-stop visual reference of all the different types of hardware? Then, you could quite easily identify what you had in your (or anyone else’s) computer.

Found such a great reference:

Like it or hate it – Twitter is here to stay. Its a unique kind of social networking. If you compare if to Facebook, it’s like sending status updates to the friends (or followers in Twitter speak).

I come across a fabulous use of Twitter last week – unfortunately it was related to a tragedy that it is still unfolding as this post is being written.

Twitter can be used to get live news updates from either individuals or from large news conglomerates. And the best thing is if you dont have a twitter account is you don’t need it!

Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in something you want updates on. The search result will list Tweets containing your search string from any Twitter user.

If it’s a hot topic your screen will advise you of new matches. All you have to do is click on refresh to get the new tweets.

I used this unique tweet search to find tweets from everyone from the recent Air France plane disappearance. Amazing some of the stories I read, and my search results were being updated at the rate of about one tweet per second.

Have a play around with it. Very handy tool on the internet.

I wanted to find some info on Twitter – how it worked etc in a easy to read format. What I stumbled on was a set of youtube videos that are titled ‘explanations in plain english’.

I must say they are quite well presented and very informative. The neat little effect used to deliver these plain english explanantions is brilliant.

The URL for these videos is http://au.youtube.com/user/leelefever

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Explanations in plain english – youtube videos