Scheduled Site Shutdown
Due to recent spam injection attacks (perhaps you noticed the pharmacological links that keep appearing as comments to random stories?), I will of necessity be taking the site down for service and upgrade later today. I deleted one of the most recent users in the mistaken belief that that was my culprit (sorry!), and made some changes (no anonymous posting of comments), but they problem did not go away as expected. Hopefully the site will be back up soon, as its a long weekend I hope to be able to get it done by Tuesday. See you soon!
Comment posted on 5-31-2004
Well, the reason for the upgrade was that I was running an older version of
Geeklog and I was hoping that upgrading to the latest version could help
immunize me against the anonymous comment spammer who has been
trying to boost his(?) google rating by posting comments riddled with links to
his web site. In the hope that someone more nefarious than me will take it
upon themselves to put an end to this idiot’s reign of terror: This the URL all
the links point to http://www.01j.com/ The IP address that shows up in my
logs for the annoying posts is 69.5.72.104
Comment posted on 5-31-2004
The upgrade to latest version might not stop the spammer, but a
security fix from the geeklog gurus was posted today and I have
installed it for testing. If you have any issues posting comments, lt
me know!
Comment posted on 5-31-2004
The site was completely deleted, retooled and uploaded again, so
many things may be broken. If you notice something, please let
me know!
Comment posted on 6-1-2004
On my site we
have battled the spammers to no end. I’ve personally received 50 or more
spams in a single day. Somehow the IP’s are varried, maybe even spoofed
somehow, so I couldn’t just IP ban them. They’re nasty folk.
One of the weird things about the spam was that it didn’t seem to come
through the commenting. Blogs that had been disabled and were no longer
reachable could still get spam comments on them.
One of my friends that runs my blog host has virtually solved the problem
with a plug-in for Movable Type. The airwaves are clear again and all is
fine in the world. He’s good at this kind of thing, he is a professional in
internet security and if you continue to have trouble I can hook you up
with him via e-mail. He was running Gary Hart’s blog in fact, I think he
still is.
Comment posted on 6-2-2004
Thanks, but the folks at http://www.geeklog.net“>Geeklog were all over it the first day and
made a patch available for the anonymous comment hole within
hours. I need to do the upgrade anyway, so it worked out that it
was a long weekend.
Comment posted on 6-3-2004
I am very happy to see that all is right with the ‘world’ again.