Malware Musings

You’d think that with fifteen years experience working in I.T., and the experience working with computers before that, that I would have learned to save my work often! I figured that I’d be ok, as the WordPress web interface keeps telling me that it has saved a draft copy. That was fine until I somehow wiped out a whole load of content only to then have the WordPress web interface save the remaining text as the draft.

You’d think that by now, I would have also learned that web forms and web interfaces can be a tad finicky! So here I was with a reasonable amount of content for part three of my ‘The Usefulness of Strings During Static Malware Analysis’ series, which, during a fight with the content formatting interface, I saw magically disappear before my eyes (maybe I shouldn’t have attempted a blog post on the 13th!).

The WordPress web interface doesn’t seem to offer any ‘rollback’ feature allowing you to go back to a particular version of a draft (or not that I could quickly find anyway), so it seems that its auto save feature will only protect you against events such as your browser/PC crashing.

I think that, following this incident, I shall write the content for my blog posts using ‘vi’, and periodically save it as a plain text file. I’ll then copy that content in to the WordPress web interface and then proceed to fight with the text formatting.

On the plus side, I did do a ‘Preview’ before wiping out the large slab of content, so the browser tab with the preview page still has the old content — I’ll copy that (using the clipboard in case a ‘Save as…’ reloads the page first) to a text file. However, given that it’s now early evening, I’m reasonably hungry, and I’ve just found out that I have to be up at 04:00 in the morning, I’m going to work on finishing part three another day.