Pruning Some Fruit Trees and Fighting Off the Bad Guys

Monday January 2, 2017 Guerneville CA.

More rain today, in more ways than one

It was raining off and on as I got it going today. I decided to stay home and prune some fruit trees as that needs to get done for the new season.

I was checking my blog site to see if it was ok. I found some bad guys trying to get to my login. I was using Wordfence, so I blocked their IP’s repeatedly and thought I was good, but I was wrong on that one.

By now we were getting a cold shower every once in awhile, so I stayed inside where it was warm, until there was a break.

Pruning some fruit trees in the yard

I got my tools and decided to attack this peach tree first.

I removed a lot of old limbs and got it to look like this which should be good to go.

I did this one too, Rio Osa Peach.

In the house to warm up

I did two more small apple trees near by and then a cold shower hit so I went in the house to warm up.

I still need to prune all these trees in my fruit orchard.

Sometimes I get all the pruning done and sometimes I don’t. I’ve had some don’t times in the past several years, so this year I’m trying harder to get er done.

I must have pissed the guy off this morning

I sat down and checked out my blog again and ran a security scan to be be safe. Unfortunately, the hacker must have been upset when I blocked him. Now my site was infected with a bunch of bad stuff and they also messed up my Wordfence  software plugin which I’ve started to use to help protect my site.

I deleted most of the bad stuff and in the process dumped a file that let me in my site and now I was locked out too with several more errors that were confusing.

What to do?

I shut the site down with my .htaccess file which I leaned about when Sonic.net locked me out the first time this happened. I just entered my IP address in the file and I should be able to get in, but no one else could, hopefully not the bad guy.

I knew I needed to get a new version of my wordfence protection software as the version I had installed had been compromised.

But now I couldn’t get into my blog site without several error messages, so I had to fix that.

More thought

It took awhile, but eventually, I realized I could use my Filezilla program to change files in my WordPress directory, which is at my ISP, so I started doing that from backups until I could get into my blog site without error messages.

Once in my site dashboard, I uninstalled Wordfence  and I installed the  new Wordfence security software and did a fresh scan.

I had nine bad files I needed to replace or fix, so I carefully replaced the bad ones with good ones and finally my blog site was working with no errors and when I did a scan with Wordfence and it found no problems.

That all brought me up to now, about seven PM.

Now let’s see if I can get this blog published as I chanced several passwords. :O)