Buck Lawrimore


Business. Marketing. Current Events. The World. Ideas.

Archive for September, 2008

What’s Wrong With America: Complexity

author Posted by: admin on date Sep 29th, 2008 | filed Filed under: Politics/Government

America is in dire straits right now. The economy is in chaos. Gasoline is in short supply. Unemployment is on the rise. How could our advanced country be in such a mess?

The answer I believe is that the country and its economy have become too complex for unskilled Congressmen - or presidents for that matter - to effectively manage this giant system. American government is far more complex than any corporation. Yet look at the skilled, experienced managers running GE, IBM and other top corporations.

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Hijacked by Hackers - Do Wordpress Themes Have Holes?

author Posted by: admin on date Sep 2nd, 2008 | filed Filed under: Internet

We’ve moved our blog from one web host to another because of a malicious hacking that occurred on Labor Day. Every page on every website we had on that hosting company was hacked with an advertisement for Viagra, placed at the bottom of the page and technically not visible. However it caused each page to load slowly and we assume the intent was to steal our visitors. It is taking us many hours to purge the bad Viagra code from our pages, and we’re still not done.

We host other websites with this company, one of the web’s largest hosts, and none of them have been hacked. So we have to assume that the point of entry was our Wordpress blog, or perhaps the Studio Press theme we were using. Research online indicates that themes can be one of the biggest “hacker holes” on websites because they are not all vetted for tight security. By contrast the themes offered on wordpress.org, including this one, are supposedly checked out to be OK.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a  Wordpress blog or are thinking about it, don’t host it on a control panel or account shared with other websites, and be very careful about the themes you choose - stick with those on the Wordpress site to be safe.