Sunday, August 12, 2012

Domain Name cloaking using frames

Learn't something the other day. We have a wordpress web site on hostable.com and the Domain Name is with Freeparking.


We have been having trouble with the url displaying in the browser. So you get "http://mydomain.com/" no matter what page is displayed - this is pretty useless if you want to bookmark a page.


Lots of web searching revealed that Freeparking cloak your site in a 100% frame - which is VERY bad form as search engines tend to ignore any frame based sites (we couldn't figure out why the site rated so poorley).


So the actual page HTML looks like


<frameset rows="100%,*">


<frame name="top" src="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/" noresize="noresize" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" />
<noframes> 
   <body>
   <p><i>This document uses a frameset.</i></p>    
   <p><a href="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/">Click Here</a> to view the page.</p>
   </body>
</noframes>
</frameset>


Ok.. so off to Freeparking Help desk .. and their response


 


Subject: [WebFarm/Freeparking #1400011] URL Redirection - xxxx.co.nz


 Hi ,  There's no good answer to that unfortunately. Cloaked wont show much in the way of filenames, or anything else, as you mentioned. You can really only cloak it or not cloak it.  -- Regards, Chris



So the choice is either show xxxx.co.nz on all pages or  forget the domain and wind up with urls like http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/be-involved/ .. so whats the point of the domain name???


There does not appear to be away around this apart from:



  1. Host the site with freeparking or

  2. register the domain name with someone else (though check if they also do cloaking the same way - I have been told godaddy does the same)


Any ideas welcome....


13-Aug: Suggestion from Inga - does require certain conditions to be met before this will work.  http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/frame-blocking-anti-clickjacking.shtml


 



Wordpress hacking: Bat Boy and Mr. DJh

Grr!@###$


What a damn nuisance  looks like there is a way to hack your WordPress web site. My research shows it as The Bat Boy or in my case Mr. DJh (see below)


Bat Boy Hack on WordPress


It does 2 things



  1. Changes your admin login & email account in the users table and (this means you can't log in as admin)

  2. Changes index.php code for the theme (which is what shows on the page)


Anyway this is how to fix it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESp_rceZ_gw


UNFORTUNATELY, in my case the admin user was unchanged (but I still can't log in) but one of the index.php files in the template was changed (you can see by the edit date on the server) though cleverly in code: starts like


? echo(stripslashes(base64_decode('PGh0bWw+ ..... 


Renaming the folder killed the site so the hack is in there somewhere and this was the only program with a different date that I could find.


At this stage I can either find the index.php file (which is pretty old) or reinstall Wordpress and import the main blog (which I will probably do as it was only my backup anyway). 


I am guessing a flaw was found in one of the versions of WordPress and subsequently fixed by the WordPress people, however (as in my case) this was my backup blog and was quite old - so probably had the flaw still, and so wide open for the hack. My more recent one was left alone (so far) - this one. Can anyone confirm this???


So the Moral is "Keep up with updates" - yes I should know that!!!!