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Why Instagram is a Game-Changer for Your Brand

Instagram is more than just a platform for sharing pretty photos—it’s a powerful tool for growing your business, building connections, and engaging with your audience. Here are some key benefits:

Visual Storytelling: Instagram is perfect for showcasing your brand’s personality and telling your story through eye-catching images and videos. 🎥✨

Increased Engagement: With features like Stories, Reels, and IGTV, it’s easy to interact with your audience in creative ways. Polls, Q&As, and DM interactions help boost real-time engagement, since even likes and Instagram comments matter, and you can even go online and find places to buy Instagram comments as well.

Targeted Marketing: Reach the right audience with Instagram’s advanced targeting options for ads. Whether it’s through demographics, interests, or behaviors, you can tailor your message to the people who matter. 🎯📈

Influencer Collaboration: Connect with influencers in your niche to amplify your message. Influencer marketing can give your brand credibility and reach new potential customers, and you can also get Instagram ads to help you with this.

Shop Directly on the App: Instagram Shopping allows users to discover, browse, and purchase products without ever leaving the app! It’s a seamless way to drive sales. 🛍️📲

Community Building: Instagram helps you build a loyal and engaged community around your brand as Instagram have more than 2 billion users at the moment. People love connecting with brands that are relatable and consistent! ❤️🤗

Ready to make the most of your Instagram strategy? Let’s grow your brand together! 🚀

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Gootloader infection cleaned up

Dear blog owner and visitors,

This blog had been infected to serve up Gootloader malware to Google search victims, via a common tactic known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) poisioning. Your blog was serving up 384 malicious pages. Your blogged served up malware to 95 visitors.

I tried my best to clean up the infection, but I would do the following:

  • Upgrade WordPress to the latest version (one way the attackers might have gained access to your server)
  • Upgrade all WordPress themes to the latest versions (another way the attackers might have gained access to your server)
  • Upgrade all WordPress plugins (another way the attackers might have gained access to your server), and remove any unnecessary plugins.
  • Verify all users are valid (in case the attackers left a backup account, to get back in)
  • Change all passwords (for WordPress accounts, FTP, SSH, database, etc.) and keys. This is probably how the attackers got in, as they are known to brute force weak passwords
  • Run antivirus scans on your server
  • Block these IPs (5.8.18.7 and 89.238.176.151), either in your firewall, .htaccess file, or in your /etc/hosts file, as these are the attackers command and control servers, which send malicious commands for your blog to execute
  • Check cronjobs (both server and WordPress), aka scheduled tasks. This is a common method that an attacker will use to get back in. If you are not sure, what this is, Google it
  • Consider wiping the server completly, as you do not know how deep the infection is. If you decide not to, I recommend installing some security plugins for WordPress, to try and scan for any remaining malicious files. Integrity Checker, WordPress Core Integrity Checker, Sucuri Security,
    and Wordfence Security, all do some level of detection, but not 100% guaranteed
  • Go through the process for Google to recrawl your site, to remove the malcious links (to see what malicious pages there were, Go to Google and search site:your_site.com agreement)
  • Check subdomains, to see if they were infected as well
  • Check file permissions

Gootloader (previously Gootkit) malware has been around since 2014, and is used to initally infect a system, and then sell that access off to other attackers, who then usually deploy additional malware, to include ransomware and banking trojans. By cleaning up your blog, it will make a dent in how they infect victims. PLEASE try to keep it up-to-date and secure, so this does not happen again.

Sincerly,

The Internet Janitor

Below are some links to research/further explaination on Gootloader:

https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2021/03/01/gootloader-expands-its-payload-delivery-options/

https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2021/08/12/gootloaders-mothership-controls-malicious-content/

https://www.richinfante.com/2020/04/12/reverse-engineering-dolly-wordpress-malware

https://blog.sucuri.net/2018/12/clever-seo-spam-injection.html

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