I Was An Internet Scammer.

I’ve been slack in keeping this blog updated.  You can see by the dates on my previous posts, I haven’t added much new material in recent weeks.  But if there was ever a reason for someone to tend to their blog more often, it’s the one I’m about to tell you about.

The other day when I tried to log on to my account, I noticed timwaller.com had been shut down.  My web hosting company suspended my account for a “terms of service violation.”

Huh?

Shocked and surprised, I called the company to see what rules I had broken with this humble blog.  After waiting 20 minutes to speak to someone in tech support, I got my answer, which blew me away.   It seems someone overseas hacked into my account and turned this blog into a phishing website!  That’s almost funny considering the vast number of TV stories I’ve done on how to protect yourself from this popular scam.

My first task was to convince the young man on the phone that I am not a scammer, and this was not my doing.  Satisfied with my explanation, he led me through a series of steps to find and delete a rogue program that had been added to my blog through a “back door.”  At first, I didn’t think I possessed the technological know-how to do as he instructed.  This was seriously advanced stuff.   But after digging through subfolder after subfolder, there it was. A file entitled, “Abbey National.”  This hidden program made my blog appear to be a bank website that asked visitors to enter their account numbers, user names and passwords.    I deleted the file as instructed, and the suspension on my account was lifted.

Now I am faced with the difficult task of securing my website by following a list of difficult instructions my web hosting company has given me.   Believe me when I say, the list reads like a foreign language, using words like “mysql” and “public_html.”

But I must figure it out.  I don’t think readers of this blog will take too kindly to my running a phishing scam.  Not that I meant to run one in the first place.

A quick note about the author:  Tim Waller lives in Greenville, South Carolina. He is a news reporter at Hearst Television station WYFF-TV.