Author: sepedatua

Hey, I'm SepedaTua — a self-taught programmer and sysadmin in my early 40s, running CrushEdge to share the fixes I wish I'd found faster. I spend my days wrestling WordPress, WooCommerce, Linux servers, PHP, Python, and whatever else small-business sites throw at me. After years of trial-and-error (and way too many late-night server crashes), I document the solutions that actually work — safely, with backups first, and no unnecessary fluff. Outside the terminal, I'm a dad to four awesome kids, married to my best friend, and still squeezing in some video games when the house quiets down. If you're stuck on a problem, grab a coffee and let's sort it out together.
Hey, I'm SepedaTua — a self-taught programmer and sysadmin in my early 40s, running CrushEdge to share the fixes I wish I'd found faster. I spend my days wrestling WordPress, WooCommerce, Linux servers, PHP, Python, and whatever else small-business sites throw at me. After years of trial-and-error (and way too many late-night server crashes), I document the solutions that actually work — safely, with backups first, and no unnecessary fluff. Outside the terminal, I'm a dad to four awesome kids, married to my best friend, and still squeezing in some video games when the house quiets down. If you're stuck on a problem, grab a coffee and let's sort it out together.

How to Delete Thousands of .TXT Files from Google Drive

If you run automated backups, sync log files, or work with data export scripts, Google Drive can quickly turn into a dumping ground. Last week, while cleaning up some folder structures, I found thousands of stray .txt files scattered across subfolders. Clicking them one by one in the web browser was out of the question—unless I wanted my weekend stolen…

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Part 4 — The Log Lines That Weren’t There

Part 4 of a real-world WordPress VPS compromise investigation By SepedaTua — CrushEdge.com By this point I had enough evidence to say: The server had been compromised. I had malicious PHP. I had disguised image files. I had a PHP-based file manager. I had an encoded payload. I had a native executable associated with cryptomining. I had suspicious database activity….

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Part 3 — I Needed Remote MySQL Access, So I Made It Too Easy

Part 3 of a real-world WordPress VPS compromise investigation By SepedaTua — CrushEdge.com There was another problem waiting for me after the filesystem investigation. MySQL. And this one was partly my own fault. I had a legitimate reason for allowing remote MySQL connections. Some of my applications live on temporary cloud VPS instances. I create a VPS when I need…

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Part 2 — The Files Were Pretending to Be WordPress

Part 2 of a real-world WordPress VPS compromise investigation By SepedaTua — CrushEdge.com In Part 1, I stopped the server and started looking at the filesystem instead of immediately trying to get the websites back online. The first confirmed webshell was bf6f03.php. Then I found something more interesting. The attacker had apparently decided that naming a file shell.php was too…

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