Another Bad Day In Texas In Durango Computer World

I believe the red you see in the picture is called Sumac. It was coloring up the Tandy Hills today.

Speaking of today, I am having myself a day today. My one longtime reader may remember my recent trauma over websites being hacked, which ended up with me moving my websites to a new server.

I have not gone a long enough time, trouble free, to feel safe. Yesterday I learned one of my websites was generating a dire warning. Worse than anything previous. The warning is coming from anti-virus programs, like Avast and Norton.

About a half hour before I was scheduled to take off for the Tandy Hills I discovered what I thought was a huge security hole in the permissions settings on my websites. I started changing the settings, then thought I needed to walk away and think it through. It's a good thing I did that, because the permissions were set correctly and the changes I was making was causing access to be denied. I was back here about 1.5 hours later and quickly fixed that problem. It being a problem that I had created.

But, I still had that other website generating the dire warning. From Norton I learned the precise location and name of the offending file. But that folder and file no longer exists. It was deleted on the old server.

So, I'm thinking this is some legacy woe that is somehow causing this one domain to be still flagged as a problem. Norton has a thing where you can request a review if it is your website and you know it is problem free. I had to create an account first. No big deal. I had to verify site ownership by placing code from Norton in the root directory. Again, no big deal.

But. The Norton instructions were very bad. Norton told me to place a line of code,

"wiye0k1nf3iakqnwf5djo6f7k9eqj74vf3n2mbh8w0z3m1906izjjqcuowlgz5x-kznkn8wj3suia8r5vlkokpd-yg45fn2cbkjza01zc38el7j6orsxk5h5jeo-d85a",

in the root directory.

Well, I've traveled this road before. You can't just put code randomly in a directory. So, I made it both an HTML file and a .txt file and named it what Norton called it. Which was nortonsw_a0c259d0-ac7c-0.html.txt, removing the .txt for the .html verson.

Uploaded the file. Clicked on the "verify" button. Got told verification failed. 10 minutes later I get an email from Norton, with the email now step by step explaining what I already knew to do, correctly, and had already done, correctly. Only to fail.

So, I tried again, in the oft chance I'd somehow mis-copied something. Failure again.

This had me remembering why I long ago bailed using Norton's Anti-Virus software. Norton programs are worse than getting a virus.