The thunderbolts site was recently the victim of a distributed brute force attack which spread across WordPress sites all around the globe in a matter of minutes. An injection of unusual hidden scripts onto our site is what caused the “Malware Ahead” warning which Google issued and forced onto the frontend of our site along with many thousands of others. Unfortunately, Google’s warning and the removal thereof lag somewhat in comparison to any real-time threat.
Upon the realization that something serious was amiss, we engaged the services of a very reputable professional site cleanup service (wpsecuritylock.com). Due to the sheer size of our site (and other mitigating circumstances like power outages caused by snow, Murphy’s Law hard at work et. al.) and the fact that each and every file (including images) needed to be inspected for malicious code, this took a number of days to achieve. A “normal” site would usually be in maintenance mode for only a day or so, even less.
We are assured that the site now contains no malicious code or scripts. There is no real way of knowing if any visitors may have had their own computers compromised so it is prudent that all visitors to our site (and any other WordPress based sites) over the last several weeks have their computers scanned by one or more of the virus/malware removal tools which are readily available on the internet. If you don’t already have such software on your machine, be sure to seek sound advice as to which tools are reputable and only ever get them from the proper source.
We apologize for the long delay in getting our site up and running smoothly again but can assure visitors that we have beefed up security to the hilt and taken all of the advice the professionals have issued. Thank you for your patience.
