Good heavens… only half an hour to sort out this time. It seems there’s was another Base64 section in functions.php in this free theme – and the Antivirus plugin didn’t pick it up. I have now checked the whole theme by hand and removed the offending code.
For most people the threat of hacking is simply a threat. It’s a risk anyone with a website lives with, but until it happens, most of us give it little thought.
So I was surprised to notice on my way to bed last night that the front page of my blog had been replaced with this screen which reads “Hacked by Amin Safi”:
How could this have happened? Had my passwords been discovered through a brute force attack? Would the blog I’d recently migrated have to be recreated from scratch? Was my entire material wealth currently being sucked from my grasp by some enormous virtual vacuum cleaner?
When I’d calmed down, I set about finding out how to repair the damage and prevent it happening again. Naturally there is a lot of information available on-line.
First, it’s not an uncommon experience: this cyber crime site lists a number of similar violations. And there are no teams of pale, dark-eyed teenagers. It’s mostly done by code which exploits vulnerabilities in WordPress, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.
The damage was relatively minor: I couldn’t log in to WordPress, so first I had to go in via CPanel and reset the user passwords. This allowed me to enter the dashboard and select the default WordPress theme, which restored my blog to functionality, if not to its former glory.
The following day I returned to understand more fully how my blog had been compromised.
I deleted the hacked index.php file, then reinstalled the theme I had been using, Stripe, which I had found on the web.
I then installed Antivirus and scanned the theme. Antivirus pointed out the footer was encoded in Base64 and decoding the characters in the footer, I found some code which displays an advertisement for acne medication.
I also installed Exploit Scanner, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to worry about, so having removed the dubious code and replaced the Base64 encoded section with regular, the theme is up and running again.
The following pages all helped me:
Useful new short film from Red Sky Vision featuring Neville Hobson, David Ferrabee and Richard Dennison, among others:
“There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”
Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo.
The publicity for last night’s London Area Communicators’ Group October Meetup was intriguing: based around social networking, it would take place in Clerkenwell Theatre and feature a group of actors. Unsurprisingly given such novelty, it filled up quickly.
Arriving early after an energising stroll up from the Thames, I was greeted warmly at the door and asked to complete a profile which I taped up on the wall. After saying hello to some familiar faces, I filled my plate and glass (several times each) ready for the show. There seemed to be a lot of new faces and it wasn’t just because I’d missed the social events over the summer and the most recent meetup. Moving the group to LinkedIn seems to have increased its visibility.
Presented by London Area Communicators’ Group, the evening was a collaboration between The Big Wheel Theatre Company who performed songs and sketches and Jason Buck who ran a social media/enterprise/web 2.0 workshop.
After several introductory sketches and songs with a social media theme, we moved upstairs, passing through offices where employees were engaged in amusing scenarios, for the workshop section.
Jason gave a brief introduction then we were asked to consider the different attitudes to social media tools which might be displayed by four archetypal employees of a fictional company, as exemplified by the characters associated with Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor and Sid James.
Following the “Carry On…” theme, we were encouraged to cram as many innuendoes as possible into our conversation, something for which I am proud to report our group – “Big End – we give it to you straight up” – won special recognition.
After the workshop, we returned to the ground floor where we were greeted with champagne served by a lady on stilts, which I can confidently state is a first in my experience. There were more songs and a chance to quickly discuss how much we’d enjoyed the evening before departing into the night in the direction of Kings Cross station.
Thanks to Jason Buck, The Big Wheel Theatre Company and Matt O’Neill for organising a great evening.
Spending too long inside one organisation can distort your view of reality. I like to keep my feet on the ground by meeting people from other organisations and listening to them talk about their intranets and attitudes to social media. If nothing else, listening to people talk about their KM experiences at events like Gurteen Knowledge Cafés gives you the sense you’re not entirely alone.
Yesterday’s Ark Group social software masterclass was a great opportunity to hear about other organisations intranets then sit down to discuss the challenges faced by some of the attendees. For me it was also a chance to catch up with David Ferrabee and Neville Hobson who presented at Melcrum’s social media conference two years ago. Neville’s presentation that day marked my first sight of Twitter and convinced me that I needed to be active in external social media as well as internal, so I was looking forward to seeing what’s on his radar at the moment.
Neville sets the scene with a presentation about the progress of social media in 2009, before we’re briefly interrupted by a fire alarm and have to file out into the blazing sunshine in Holborn. While we’re standing outside it dawns on me that I’ve seen Denise Maskew before. In fact I missed her presentation when I had to leave KCUK 2008 early, so I finally get the opportunity I’d been hoping for to catch up with her work.
United Utilities
Denise talks about the challenges involved in introducing social media tools at United Utilities and the drivers behind the strategy. They’re experimenting with a wider range of tools than we are, so it’s interesting to hear about podcasts and wikis along with more familiar applications like commented news and blogs. I note they’re using Red Dot for content management,
Pfizer
Pfizers’ Ben Gardner is next, talking about their Project Collaborate aimed at increasing team interactivity. They’re also using technology I’d like to be experimenting with internally, including wikis and RSS. I suggested at a brainstorming meeting earlier this year that we might consider replacing the intranet with a wiki in the long term. I still think this is an excellent way forward and the views I heard expressed at July’s Corporate Social Networking Forum have reinforced this.
The technology I’m not familiar with today is Microsoft OneNote, a tool for unstructured note taking which Pfizer are using as a front end to Sharepoint. (Indeed, I’m so unfamiliar with it, I later refer to it as iNote.) Ben also shows us some of the cultural and communication efforts used to engage users, including Meet Jessica, Pfizer’s own variation of Meet Charlie – what is enterprise 2.0?.
(I had to make a note during Ben’s presentation as I didn’t know Google Chrome can be installed on locked desktops. It installs without updating the registry, which is great… as long as I don’t want to use any sites with Flash. It also highlights some problems with the CSS on the intranet.)
British American Tobacco
My presentation on the cultural impact of social computing tools (slides available here) looked less at the technology, more at the internal landscape, design and cultural impact of the tools.
We’ve focused on communities, blogs and social networking, all of which are still gaining acceptance. Our efforts to encourage knowledge sharing in online communities foundered for seven years with five different technologies, until we started looking at more creative ways to build social networks between the participants.
The blogging experiment has run for five years now and we’ve just had two directors begin blogging in the past twelve months. (Neville laughs at one point, saying out that ours is the twelfth instance of “BlogCentral” he’s heard of!)
Looking at other organisations’ work always gives me ideas for where we can go next. I’ve felt for some time that we need to move social computing further on and seeing what other companies are achieving always reignites that passion. I’m looking forward to the meeting of the Intranetters group next Wednesday, 26th August.
“The Quiet Revolution”
Despite having worked in Knowledge Management for around six years, I’ve never yet seen Euan Semple speak. An odd omission which was happily rectified last night at the National Audit Office which hosted April’s Melcrum Communicators’ Network London Meetup
Euan talks a lot of what to me seems commonsense and I find myself nodding in agreement at what he’s saying… then thinking back and realising how far ahead of the curve his work at the BBC was and that for the most part we’re still catching up.
His observations on organisational politics ring true, particularly where he talks about the fear which seems to pervade any discussion about social tools, when all we’re doing is conducting “…self-correcting conversations in the open.”
What could there possibly be to fear in that?
Sandwiched between the Thames Flood Barrier and The Valley – home of Charlton Athletic and once London’s largest football ground – is a nondescript trading estate full of run-down buildings, breaker’s yards and workers’ cafés. Among the semi-derelict buildings sporting broken windows, Building 24 has been stripped of the light industrial machinery which once populated it. The walls have been painted white and the huge floors partitioned off to create the perfect space for a photoshoot.
We are here – a stone’s throw from Charlton Park where Antonioni shot some exteriors for 60s fashion flick “Blow Up” – to see the visual realisation of the Global Employer Brand project. Models Ufuoma, Tim, Mairi, David and Sergio were selected from Globe House HR employees to pose in ways representing the theme of “Bring Your Difference”.
Friday morning saw the model makers put the finishing touches to a huge Death Star-like construction formed of small interconnecting shapes which will later be coloured by computer. The afternoon is spent with the models posing variously in front of a section of larger shapes which will also be subject to computerised jiggery-pokery at a later date. On Monday, the fun really begins with our models suiting up and throwing paint over another part of the construction.
The Global Employer Brand debuts on 7th November.
Last night’s meeting of the London Group of the Melcrum Communicators’ Network was the usual mix of compelling presentation and stimulating conversation, not that you would expect anything less from professional communicators.
This month Russell-Oliver Brooklands – ROB to his friends – spoke about the need to improve the internal comms process, for which he has come up with the Internal Communication Model for Business. Rob has a fascinating personal story and did an excellent job of identifying the pitfalls of Internal Comms – I found myself ticking all 12 of his list of problems which you may have encountered at some point.
My interest – along with most of those in the room – was piqued when he spoke about seven “triggers” which cause people react to communications by taking one of three roles in the process: communicator, audience or detached observer.
Despite probing, Rob was loathe to elucidate, saying that he’d once tried to sum up in a short period what he usually takes a day to teach and the client had lost a substantial sum of money as a result (“citation needed”).
A great example of “Lost” director J.J. Abrams’s principle of “don’t open the box“..!
I am not a pragmatic man.
If I were, I would have asked for an alternative venue to be found for last night’s Melcrum Communicators’ Network meeting as soon as I was out of hospital. Having no experience of recovering from surgery I overestimated my return to fitness, foolishly basing it on my rather hasty discharge (from hospital). If you end up in surgery, do yourself a favour and postpone your commitments for the next month. I hate to let people down, so I’ve often failed to make these decisions quickly enough, preferring to “see how it goes” rather than give myself the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’m sure nothing will go wrong.
Something went wrong when I returned to the office a few days beforehand to find my potential food and drink sponsor on leave until the day of the meetup. Organiser Matt O’Neill kindly volunteered to provide food and drink, which is a no-no as it is against The Rules as I pondered to myself at 3am the night before, visualising my position potentially disappearing down the plughole. Matt was as good as his word and with a little jiggery-pokery we managed to sidestep nearly every potential enforcer of The Rules.
On the day, name badges are ready (most are even spelled correctly) and it should be simple enough to escort everyone in. With people due to arrive, I go to check on the room I’d booked and find the previous occupants still in session, having overrun by 30 minutes. Ten minutes later they are still there. 25 minutes after we should have been in, I hear the immortal words “We have a big problem”. Apparently, 17:30 doesn’t always mean 5:30pm and they were planning to continue indefinitely. We hastily change our plans, relocate to the boardroom and set up with relatively few hassles.
And then I split my trousers.
It was around this point I decided to display some of the positive unflappability Matt had shown all the way through. Either that, or I began to see the funny side and stopped caring quite so much about relatively minor problems.
In contrast to the behind the scenes shenannigans, the presentation “Recruiting Communicators” by Cassandra Barker of recruitment consultants Robert Walters was extremely professional and stimulated much discussion. Having canvassed the opinions of recruiters, candidates and clients about all stages of the process, the presentation summarised the findings, some advice for candidates and illustrated the points with some key quotes from the participants.
The point which jumped out at me was the slightly ironic request from candidates for more communication during the process. Some felt they needed to understand more about why they were being recalled for a second interview and that more feedback would help them prepare better.
My own limited experience of recruitment has been about finding a programmer with sufficient skills and personality to join an existing team. I came away from this meetup feeling I understood more about the executive recruitment process from a much broader set of perspectives.
The MCN meetups will continue through the summer on a social basis, beginning with a barbecue in Southwark on 20th June.
The Law
The second day of the conference began with Brodies IT head Damien Behan talking about why he has resisted many attempts to adopt social media technology. My ears pricked up at one point he made about how “most viruses come through websites, not e-mail”. Maybe the webmail blockers have it all wrong.
The mood of the room was light-heartedly against his insistence on blocking Facebook and reasoning that “we go to work to work”. I wonder if the employees feel it’s a great place to work, or that they’re being policed unnecessarily? I always say it’s the same as blocking the telephone 100 years ago. Is it just a case of learning to use the tool appropriately?
Despite being a Facebook refusenik, Damien did mention the Workbook Facebook overlay which provides a secure Facebook for the enterprise.
The Media
Kevin Anderson, Guardian Blogs editor, gave us an insight into how news media has changed over the past ten years, why The Guardian has pursued social media and how their principle of “connection, not crowd-sourcing” enables them to “involve the audience in meaningful ways”.
(He even managed to slip in the “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” gag I’d been thinking about using in its “consultant” variation.)
The Big Smoke
Proving a talented chairperson can make anyone feel at home, Pfizer’s Chris Shilling introduced me as working in “the only industry more hated than pharmaceuticals”. Spread the love.
I told two stories. One about how we’d applied design thinking to community facilitation to create our CommunityBuilder framework. The other told how we’d introduced blogging into British American Tobacco with BlogCentral.
I may not have been clear enough when I made my point about the assumptions many people have about the “media savvy generation”, because one member of the audience attempted to disagree with me by agreeing with what I’d said! As I recounted, an external research agency came in last year to conduct some research on this demographic, expecting to find younger people more connected, always texting, using social media sites and so on. What they found – both inside British American Tobacco and other companies – was they don’t exist! People from all generations use these tools. (I will have to find the report and start showing it to people..!)
More Law
Although we were quick to get into blogging, we’re not the only people to have done so. Ruth Ward talked about how Allen and Overy had adopted blogging as a team communication tool.
I was impressed by how well she seemed to know the users – easier in a smaller company, but it must help your confidence when gaining support – but surprised to learn they had no blogging guidelines… until she pointed out it was all covered by the company’s communication policy.
On reflection, lawyers probably do tend to think these things through rather well.
Government 2.0
Jillian Cameron then presented an overview of how the Government is looking at new media trends and attempting to embrace them with varying degrees of success. The sheer scope of this endeavour meant some of it was a little abstract and while old media tends to knock the slightest stumble, I was impressed by the range of experimentation. Enabling this in the near future will be a fascinating pursuit, particularly with a 500,000 strong Civil Service.
Government 2.0 2
Alexis Castillo-Soto then showed off the newly-launched MOSS 2007-based intranet of the Learning and Skills Council. Not being familiar with Sharepoint, I was impressed to with the potential of the tools which are included. I could almost imagine using it myself, though the migration from Lotus Domino could be a challenge.
Let’s hope Alexis can invite the Intranetters for a visit very soon.