Several days ago, I received alerts from the hosting service I use for this blog, and from Sucuri.net, a second service that provides a separate level of security. I signed with with that service several years ago when this site was overwhelmed by one or more hackers and forced offline for several days.

In any case, I was warned that SEO spam had been found in certain files and I needed to take action to clean up the site.

To tell the truth, I was working on something else and repressed the job. Until this morning, that is, when I got a followup from my hosting service advising they would suspend my account in 48-hours if I failed to take care of the problem.

It didn’t help that when I ran Google’s Transparency Report, it didn’t find any problems. That encouraged me to procrastinate.

Well, the next problem was that I had no idea what needed to be done. And then, to compound the problem, I provided the wrong password to Sucuri, making it impossible for them to initiate a malware removal scan.

Finally I managed to contact both services and request their assistance, and managed to locate and provide the correct password.

It wasn’t long before I heard back from Hostrocket, my hosting service. The identified a few spammy files that had been deleted, and a few more outdated plug-ins that needed to be deleted.

Then I got a report from Sucuri. They reported identifying and clearing literally hundreds of hidden spam links tucked away in out of the way places invisible to me.

You’ll can easily look up and read about SEO spam, as it is apparently a widespread problem, especially with WordPress installations like this one. Here’s the brief Sucuri summary of the issue.

So…I’m sorry for whatever affects these bits of malware may have been causing to those who visited this blog. Hopefully now everything has been rendered spic and span, and all of my layers of security have been updated. Maybe it will make things run faster. We’ll see.