Blogger Blogs Being Hijacked By The Sociable Gadget

We're seeing a steady stream of reports, from blog owners in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, from Blogger blog owners, reporting the latest hijacking of their blogs.

My blog is being redirected to a search engine display.

or

My blog has a porn popup attached!

These are all blog owners who have installed the latest hack, willingly distributed by Blogger / Google.

This appears to be yet one more gadget, intentionally installed by many Blogger blog owners, which is now redirecting unwilling viewers. The redirection target is a website which provides commercial advertisements for various Internet services, which creates a variety of symptoms, as reported in the forums.

The Sociable gadget appears to be a Blogger accessory installed from the Blogger "Add a Gadget" wizard, when selected intentionally by many Blogger blog owners.

As with many reported hijacks, access to the Blogger Layout wizard appears to be affected. If you need to remove this code from your blog, you may find yourself unable to use the Layout wizard. In this case, you will need to use Firefox with Noscript - or a similarly well protected browser - to prevent the redirecting code from executing.

After removing the identified code from your blog, as always, clear cache and restart the browser. Finally, I'll remind you again, to please be particular - only install third party code from trustworthy providers.

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