Update: Website problem corrected

The last few hours you may have seen a redirect problem with the blog (this particular camera deals blog, not the main blog/domain) with a destinywall.org and letstakemetoad.com redirect warning. This was caused by a WordPress plug-in for related posts that was retired/abandoned…

Related posts are widgets that go below each post and recommend other posts.

From the looks of it, the domain letstakemetoad.com was registered late on 4/15/19.

If you know anyone using this plug-in, you/they would probably want to deactivate and delete it as soon as possible…

This is one of the reasons some people prefer to write their own plug-ins instead of using publicly-available ones. Of course in order to do this you have to have the time, energy, knowledge and/or budget…

Comments

  1. S.W. Anderson says

    Thanks for catching that and explaining the origin. I got that yesterday when trying to stop by on a Chromebook. I wanted to give you a heads up but did not want to persist trying to load the page in spite of the redirect for fear of picking up malware

    You’re right about abandoned plugins. There’s also a danger in old and abandoned freeware and shareware, even some old commercial programs.About five years ago I wanted to resurrect an old graphics program, once a name-brand item sold in brick-and-mortar software stores (remember those?). The program wouldn’t install. I googled to see if someone had come up with a workaround. Lo and behold, a patch was offered that claimed to make the old program installable. Unsure of the safety involved I did a bit more online querying and discovered the “patch” offer could appear in Google results as a fix for an extensive list of older programs. It was actually a javascript malware port openener (or something like that) that had been around awhile and reappeared from time to time under different names, claiming to do different things.

    That reminded me of the old nostrum: Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean there’s no one out to get you.

  2. yeah, and there are enough bad actors out there waiting for something to expire so they can jump in and take advantage of the situation! And it’s going to get even worse since many more software and devices “phone home” these days and when there’s no longer a “home” or when the “home” has been redirected/hijacked…