Our websites were down for a couple of days due to a Malware infection that caused them to redirect to various shopping sites.

It is a mystery how miscreants can exploit six separate websites running unique instances of WordPress in this manner. Pair doesn’t know, but I suspect their setup is somehow insecure.

We had a choice of paying over $1000US to have software fix the problem for us, plus an ongoing subscription to maybe prevent it from happening again or doing it ourselves. I did it myself, but I’m sure I wasn’t entirely successful.

It all feels like a scam to me. Software that is ubiquitous but too complex requires whole separate businesses to function, each with its subscription fees, just to deliver simple HTML files over the web.

This experience has effectively ended my 20+ year relationship with Pair, which means I will look for an alternative to WordPress for my hobbies, like this weblog. We’ve already decided to use a non-nonsense service like Squarespace for our work sites.