(Scammers, and Hackers, and Spam: Oh my!)

This site uses a presentation framework called “WordPress”, and is built using a “theme” template available from WordPress. This provides a relatively easy tool to present  travelogues etc. A great tool for bloggers, and it is widely used.
Unfortunately, because it is so widely used, sites that use it become targets for all sorts of scammers, hackers (in the bad sense of that word), and spam.

This site received a whole series of “comments” that were really nothing more than links to commercial hucksters of the predictable type. At that point I turned “off” the ability to submit comments.

Then recently, the underlying code on this site was attacked and changed to permit a “backdoor” way for scammers to post links just above the menu bar. (perhaps some of you saw the link to a site selling some pharmaceutical product). This was a clever distortion of code inserted encoded instructions written backwards.
(I did not notice the spam web link right away, because I have an ad-blocking extension installed on the browser I use most.)

Oh well… that is mostly cleaned up now. (Addressing it took over a full day, and robbed time from other projects!)

If you happen to notice something weird that pops up on a page (or if you want to point out some embarrassing misspelling or bad grammar!), just sent me an email message…

My travels: Photos and stories