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Intruders

Head Rambles Posted on by

Yesterday must have been International Intruders Day?

I first noticed it when I connected to the Interweb and my mail box suddenly filled with little alerts – someone was trying to hack into a friend's website.  There were around a hundred of these attempts, and they continued flooding in all day.  I have just checked and there are 529 alerts [and they are still arriving] so maybe this is International Intruder Weekend?  None of them bothers me as they haven't a chance of doing any damage, except maybe to my Inbox.

Then I checked this site.

Yes – my dearest and most faithful fan Trickie Dickie Doubleday had been trying to get in again.  He had failed a dozen or so times to leave a love letter in my comments, getting stuck on my primary landmines, before eventually getting through.  He would have succeded in posting a comment too, as he had hacked another of my commenters, but went and misspelled her name.  [It’s Hamlin, not Hamilton you useless fucking cunt!].

I notice that he now has his own website – http://rickiedoubleday.wordpress.com/ – fair play to him, though he doesn't  seem to have much to say for himself.

Anyhows I thought I had better check the daughter's site.  Guess what?  Yes, her stalker is back again and is trying furiously to get into her site but failing miserably.  The poor lovesick puppy has tried over 70 times to get into her site, but I had supplied her with some of my landmines and he never got anywhere.

I thought at this stage I had dealt with any and all intruders but I was wrong.

Last night I put Penny out for her last piss.

Normally she just stands there admiring the stars, but occasionally she sees an imaginary cat in the pitch darkness and goes tearing off into the undergrowth.  She then comes back looking somewhat embarrassed because she knows that I know there was no cat.

Last night she stood on the steps for a moment and then suddenly – WHAM! – she was gone like an Exocet missile into the North Wood.  I smirked to myself as I listen to her crashing around in the distance and shone a torch over to show her there wasn't anything.

I was wrong.

Next thing a fox shot out of the hedge, streaked across the lawn, behind the lake and into the South Wood with Penny gaining on it all the time.  There was a fierce racket of crashing and snapping branches before Penny emerged looking all pleased with herself.  I don't know where the fox went but I doubt it'll be back in a hurry.

Penny and I get a bit iffy with Intruders. 

 

Comments

Intruders — 17 Comments

  1. Thank you for your stout defence, the attacks seem to be continuing. I am baffled why anyone would bother, no-one is going to buy their stuff anyway.

    There are some very strange people out there, Supershadow, the Star Wars freak, seems almost sane.

    • The attacks are indeed continuing!

      You have two things they want – you have a domain that is ranked higher than any of theirs [as they will have zero credibility with Google!] and you have a software platform.

      By hacking in to the site, they can for example redirect Google "bots" to their site, fooling Google into thinking that forthefainthearted.com/viagra is a genuine and trusted site, while selling their wares.  Naturally, your ranking then drops through the floor but by then they have moved on.

      Also they can insert software to do their password scanning for them.  Every single one of the [now 547!] intruders has been locked out for 60 days, so they need a constant pool of new computers to carry on their dirty work.

      As an example, I came across a site [that had been hosted by a crap company] that had been hacked and had beautifully hidden software in it that gave access to every single aspect of that site.  The files/database could be manipulated at will and anything uploaded or downloaded.  That site would have been worth a small fortune to hackers.  It was essentially a free and trusted website for them to do whatever they wanted with.

      It may seem like an idle nuisance, but these people are extremely dangerous.  Imagine the worst case scenario – they hack your site and install software that eventually breaks into the NSA, FBI, NORAD or whoever, whose door do you think they are going to break down first?

  2. Funny, but it’s the beginning of the school holidays here. I’ve often noticed the link between that and the substantial increase in unwanted activity. Do you think the little bastards have nothing else to do with their sad lives? Or are there now school projects to amass as many intrusions as possible, using their newly-acquired computer skills?

    • An interesting theory.  I doubt it though as I have seen this type of behavior before where a site suddenly comes under pressure for a day or two.  They stop as quickly as they start.

      My friend's site had 24 hack attempts over four weeks [about average for any site i would imagine] and then has 733 in 24 hours [final count – they seem to have stopped now].  To reach that level would require some sophistication, and would indicate a very deliberate action rater than idle messing.

  3. I wandered over to Trickie Dickie Doubleday's new site and noticed that he's actually commenting on his own posts. What a sad little individual. I was actually considering bringing JT out of hibernation recently (so much to bitch talk about these days) but it seems I would have to moderate every single comment these days. Heh, probably wouldn't amount to too many?

    Glad Penny finally found something real to chase for once. It sounds like the fox gave the hound a good run for her money.

    • Sad is not the word!  He claims I'm sad for writing every day, but how would you describe someone who has been blocked yet still makes 188 attempts to leave a puerile comment?!

      Moderation is only enabled for new visitors and the very select few who have had their accounts compromised.  [Change your email address that you use here and you can go back to unlimited access!]

      Yes.  Bring Back JT!  I might even comment there from time to time?  Am I sad, or what?!

      • Okay, I cleared out another email address of mine (read: unsubscribed to the now useless subscriptions assigned to said email address that I've been too lazy to do in the past) and will be using that to post my comments here from now on.

        Also, I believe I'm going to drag JT back into the daylight here soon however, it probably won't be earlier than the coming weekend or sometime the week after as life is demanding my attention currently.

        When I do though, please don't feel too sad about leaving a comment there.

  4. Ah, I see.  

    I shall continue my invocation of Old Testament curses, that they may be as those who sit on the wall in the Second Book of Kings Chapter 18 Verse 27

  5. You certainly have a bit of luck, dontcha? Glad however that being technologically-savvy, you have some “landmines” in place to prevent unscrupulous folk from doing the site, and others, in.

    I suppose you may have had trouble with the “BaiduSpider” and its exceedingly bandwidth-ignorant attempts at crawling sites? My own site was getting hundreds of requests each hour from those assholes, most of it going “404” or “403” anyway… So, I took matters into my own hands. Searched around the Google for banning the bot itself (didn’t work on Apache, at least for me), or banning by IP.

    I used the latter, which, despite being a bit time-consuming, stopped them dead in their tracks and they stopped visiting after getting a sufficient number of errors. Cannot recall if I might even have setup a specific dummy error code just for them (HTCPCP/1.0). Ha.

    • I must check my log files for BaiduSpider.  I haven't noticed any problems but then there are so many levels of defense on my site that it may be blocked somewhere along the line.  Since I moved to CDN I have noticed a remarkable drop in unwanted traffic, from hack attempts through to spam. 

      The CDN gives stats on crawlers and the top four over the last month are:

      Bing – 31,934

      Yandex – 9,373

      Google – 5,911

      Baidu – 825

      So it looks like I'm not very popular with Baidu anyway?!

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