The Real Blogger Status

If you have a malicious or misbehaving gadget in your blog, one of the easiest blog cleanups is removal of a malicious HTML gadget . Unfortunately, this does not work, for every gadget on every blog. Depending upon how a gadget is installed, malicious code may, or may not, be visible - and if visible, may, or may not, be easily removable.

Blog owners frequently have to edit or remove various blog gadgets - and sometimes need coaching, to edit or remove. Editing or removing gadgets, normally, is pretty simple - when you know what you're looking for. Whenever you are logged in to Blogger, as a blog administrator, you can find the "Edit" link, on the dashboard Layout wizard - or the "Quick Edit" link on the blog (when "Quick Edit" is enabled), as displayed. Sometimes, identifying a problem blog gadget, to another person, isn't easy. What happens, if someone misreads your instructions?

Regularly, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , we advise people about problem code or gadgets in their blogs. Generally, this follows reports by blog owners, that their readers are being redirected to unexpected and unwanted blogs and websites, from their blogs. Sometimes, we get the reply I can't remove the code. Every time I login to Blogger, I am redirected, just as my readers are being treated! When we see the latter complaint, we recognise yet one more blog owner who does not know how to properly protect himself, from malicious code and websites. Most people, who know about Layered Security, know that proper browser security is an essential complement to a properly chosen and maintained anti malware filter.

We saw the symptoms of the first carefully engineered blog hijacks , in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , two years ago. During each succeeding holiday season, each attack has apparently become more and more deviously engineered. This season - each season starting in Fall of one year and lasting until Spring of the following year - we are seeing a hijack complement which appears to be devious in both marketing and installation technique, and which requires a complex search of the affected blogs. If you are receiving reports from your readers Your blog starts to load - but is quickly replaced by a page full of advertisements! you may need to exhaustively examine your blog for any third party code - and as always, the problem code may have been installed at any time in the past. When discovered, the hijacks are not consistently found in recently installed code.

Recently, we've had a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from unwary blog owners I can't see my blog! I load it in the browser, and another website loads in its place! or I am getting reports from my readers that my blog contains a virus. or even Blogger just deleted my blog, and tells me that it contains malware. Help! Some of these are people who have seen a shiny gadget or website, and either added the gadget to their blog, or added a link to their blog - and now, they are regretting that addition. It's not difficult to add a link to your post or to a linklist gadget, or add a new HTML / JavaScript gadget to the template. Unfortunately, past experience has taught us that what we add to our blogs today may look and work great today - but not so great, next month (or even, next year). And even if you do add a shiny gadget or link, to your blog - and it does not cause an obvious problem - be aware that some of your readers will filter untrust...

Occasionally, in the recently discovered social engineering blog attacks that involve shiny blog accessories, we've seen reports of aggressively protected malware, that's being installed on some blogs. When a misbehaving HTML gadget is the source of the problem, it's sometimes possible to click on the "Quick Edit" icon for the gadget, and click "Remove". Alternatively, go to " Page Elements ", and click on the "Edit" link for the gadget in question. This does not always work so simply, however.

With a blog that uses a Layouts template, the key blog maintenance wizards, like "Create Post". "Edit HTML". "Edit Post". "Page Elements". "Pick New Template". and others are all related. The blog template contains meta code that makes some of these wizards work. If we mess up the template, some of these wizards may not work anymore. Then, we say simply that we have a "corrupted template" . What now? Can we recover from a "corrupted template"?