Google (and several browsers that depend upon Google’s service) blocked my goolsbee.org websites for about a week. If you visited you would be presented with a scary warning about being infected with malware should you visit here. Tom Owad (ex-digital.forest intern) sent me a message to tell me about it. Unfortunately I was out of town and had no way to access the server to address the issue. My server currently resides in my basement (technically the laundry room) and my firewall blocks everything but web traffic to/from it, so I could not login an check things. I usually have a bastion host (a mac mini in my living room)I can SSH to, and then SSH to my web server from there, but the mini was off, so I was effectively locked out. Cobbler’s Children and all that…
I returned home a few days ago and waded through Google’s webmaster tools to sort out what was going on. It appears that no actual malware was being served from my site. However some old posts on my blog had comments from folks whose usernames linked to now-defunct sites that ARE now serving malware. Given that I doubt anyone is actively reading posts from 2005-2008 here, I imagine nobody really clicked those links recently. But the google-bots crawl EVERYTHING. I’ve scrubbed those usernames of their URLs here on my site. I then had Google re-scan my site for “security issues” and came up clean, so I think we’re good.
If you are still out there, and reading this… comment below.