I’m not dead, and neither is this blog. Honest. Cross my heart. This summer has just been proving to be a lot busier than I ever expected it to be. It also didn’t help that I forgot my recently-changed admin password to Wordpress. D’oh.

For the last few weeks I’ve been baffled by Safari complaining that this site was a malware host. The most puzzling aspect of the whole ordeal was that the Safari/Google malware warning referenced the IP address 74.222.134.170, and not 208.97.175.192, where it actually resides. A direct
Google malware query on the domain came back clean, too, so it didn’t seem, on the face of it, that my webserver had been compromised.

A perceptive fellow on the Google Webmasters forum noticed the following bit of fun in my source code that looked like this:

Thinking it was a result of an injection exploit like this person found, I went over all my WP files (plus my theme directory) with a fine-toothed comb, but found nothing. A further bit of digging turned up other Wordpress users who were encountering the exact same problem. The iframe code was inserted directly into posts, but by what means, nobody seems to be sure.

I will—shamefully—admit that both my WordPress admin and FTP passwords were pretty weak, and could have been brute-forced pretty easily. They’re much stronger now, and I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8, and the three posts here that contained the offending code have been cleaned. I haven’t seen any new malicious insertions since taking those steps, but I remain suspicious. If you see anything even remotely weird in the next couple of weeks here, let me know.

This year’s cherry crop is in, but a good quarter of the fruit this year shriveled and rotted just as it began to ripen. Some of the cherries on the edge of this rot zone had tiny little holes in them, which were being exploited by opportunistic ants, gnats, and beetles, as well as providing the entry points for the rot.

Argentine ants and gnats don’t bore into healthy fruit, and there was no trace of any larvae that might account for the beetles being the culprit (the mature ones being far too large to make the holes). I had no idea what was causing those initial punctures, until I saw this bug I’d never encountered before:

I took a few pictures and a short video over to the very helpful senior scientist Steve Heydon at the Bohart Museum of Entomology and he had the answer for me almost instantly: the “leaffooted bug”, or Leptoglossus, most likely to be specificically either L. clypealis or L. occidentalis, which apparently has very wide tastes and has arrived in my yard (or, perhaps, is simply in larger numbers this year; when I worriedly told Mr. Heydon I’d never seen the pest before he just shrugged and said, “it’s around”).

Working at the University has its unique perks every so often. Now all I have to do is figure out how to keep the bastards out of the upcoming plum and apricot crops.