Assisting You in Making the Most of Your Online Presence
At White Fir Design we are focused on assisting you in making sure that you make the most of your online presence. Whether you are a new business, an established business, or a non-profit organization, we provide services that will assist you in creating or improving online presence. We provide an assortment of web design, security, and marketing services. We provide the technical expertise needed to quickly and easily create or improve your online presence, so that you can spend your time on what you do best. We work hard to provide you value for your investment in your online presence and we make sure that you are fully satisfied with the work we do.
Latest Blog Posts
The Cause of a WordPress Website Having User Registration Suddenly Enabled and the Default Role Being Set to Administrator
Oftentimes, when it comes to how WordPress websites have been hacked, it is hard to say without doing a proper cleanup what was the original source of the hack. But in some cases it is easy to say what was likely the cause. Take this description of what happened with a recently hacked WordPress website: Yesterday at 23:08 I received an email from my wordpress “Admin Email Changed”: “[…]Th... Read More
How Another Hacker Was Able to Re-Add a Malicious User to a Hacked WordPress Site
In October, we wrote about how a hacker was able to re-add a malicious user to a hacked WordPress site using a database trigger. That isn't the only way they can do that, as we found while working on cleaning up a hacked WordPress website recently. In this situation, as soon as a malicious Administrator account was deleted, a new account with the same account information would be created. The caus... Read More
Upgrading Semantic MediaWiki When You Don't Have Access to the Command Line (Shell)
The tools and access that those developing web software have available is not always the same as those available to those running the software on their website. Case in point, we were recently working on an upgrade of a MediaWiki website using the Semantic MediaWiki extension where there wasn't access to the command line (shell) with the hosting account for the website. The upgrade process for Sem... Read More
You Might Need to Upgrade MediaWiki in Steps Even if the Manual Says Otherwise
It used to be that you could upgrade an older version of the MediaWiki software directly to the latest version. According to the manual for that, that officially changed as of version 1.36: Since Version 1.36, MediaWiki only commits to supporting upgrades from two LTS releases ago (see phab:T259771). Upgrades from older versions of MediaWiki will have to be performed in multiple steps. This means... Read More
How a Hacker Was Able to Re-Add a Malicious User to a Hacked WordPress Site
It is pretty common for it to appear that hacked WordPress websites have gotten re-hacked. What we find from being brought in to re-clean them is that often websites haven't been re-hacked, instead the original cleanup was incomplete, leaving parts of the hack in place. Often that is because whomever did the original clean up cut corners during the cleanup, but it is also possible the hacker has h... Read More