A very peculiar thing with the RSS feeds for some of the blogs that I read has happened since yesterday.
I use FeedDemon version 1.5 (the latest version). If you’re familiar with FeedDemon, you’ll know that you have channel groups that contain individual channels (the RSS feeds) of blogs you select to receive the feeds.
This morning I noticed that one of my channel groups showed no updated feeds since yesterday morning. Yet the channel group concerned lists the feeds from blogs that are frequently updated, many times a day in many cases. A quick check of some of those blogs shows lots of updated posts, but none of the RSS feeds in Feed Demon shows those posts.
Wow! I’ve not encountered anything like this before. Something has hijacked the RSS feed URLs for every single channel. So every time the channels in this group check for updates (that’s once per hour), it’s going to this hijacker URL. And what’s happening then, I wonder?
This may be coincidental, but the only thing I can think of that might be the cause for this is that I’ve been connected to ‘foreign’ networks for the past couple of days when I was in Paris for Les Blogs. So yesterday I was connected to the network at my hotel. Yet there was nothing that would indicate to me that anything untoward was going on.
I don’t believe for a minute that this is a Feed Demon issue, although if it’s a virus or trojan or something, maybe it might be of concern to Nick Bradbury, Feed Demon’s developer, that something like this could happen.
So I’m now running a deep scan of my PC with Norton AntiVirus as well as checking for spyware with Microsoft AntiSpyware to see if that turns up anything.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
