Update:
Ecatel, the outfit to which the IP traces back, has been fingered as hosting all kinds of activity, including Russian criminal business networks, say some hosting forums,
ORIGINAL POST
It was an interesting week on the net.
Over the weekend, some email accounts of mine vanished or were somehow blocked. Trying to get them back, I had a technician check my computer. He found that a third-party had hacked my network address.
I shut down the blog, had my computer/network repaired and did a bit of research on spam being sent my way.
My blog email, which I hadn’t accessed in many months, was so bloated with spam messages that I couldn’t even open it.
Deleting even one item took me ten minutes until I changed my email software.
There were almost thirty THOUSAND emails in my inbox.
Apparently, someone had subscribed that email address to every newsletter under the sun – credit card services, auto insurance, dating sites, hook-up sites, financial sites, just about everything.
You wonder what else your email has been used for.
It took me one-and-a-half days of non-stop work to clean out the mail-bag. I unsubscribed to some of the newsletters, then gave up, because there were so many.
My blog security software tell me that I average 300 spam comments at the blog per day, which is about as much as Wenzel at EPJ and his blog gets nearly twenty times the traffic, if not more.
Very strange.
The technician told me there were round-the-clock brute force attacks on my website from foreign IP addresses. Apparently, this is normal these days.
A few days ago, I discovered that my own IP address was eliciting complaints for hacking and spam. Apparently, the third-party that hacked my IP address was using it to do nasty stuff to other people.
It was all very nerve-racking and sobering.
Just now, hardly back on the net for a few hours, I find that the very same IP address behind last week’s attacks is again attacking me.
(93.174.93.218)
Is this every blogger’s experience?
The IP address goes back to the Hague in the Netherlands to some outfit called Ecatel.
I wondered if I should call or write to complain. I see that the IP has been listed on 15 spam/malware sites.
Hi Lila, welcome back. I was worried what had happened to your website. I am glad you are on top of things here. To lose your valuable voice for any reason would be a travesty.
Just fyi. I think the protection afforded by hosting with google’s blogger on blogspot.com, and Automattic’s wordpress.com directly, without hosting your website yourself, far exceeds the security you can do yourself with using the wordpress kit, which you are presently doing.
Both Blogger and WordPress hosted webpages, which is free as you might know, have no known subversions, as these websites are hosted directly by the corporations which deploy their entire muscle behind their iinfrastructure, with full management of your hosted websites with the same security, I imagine, as their own websites.
I find the convenience of that simplicity and absence of headaches, far surpassing hosting yourself.
Of course, as you obviously understand the tradeoff, one is subject to policing and censorship by these corporate hosts according to their private sence of delicacy for political correctness, and free-speech limit. And you obviously don’t entirely control everything, including layout being constrained to their available templates.
But modulo that, you gain the security of their infrastructure. It’s a tradeoff.
Your mileage may vary.
Good luck,
zahir
Hi Zahir,
Yes, I’m thinking about going back to wordpress.com, but you know, I have seen some disinfo about me/relating to me at pretty high levels, unbelievable as it might sound.
Certain pieces of information, stories, have been manipulated even by Google’s supposedly robotic algorithms.
Ha. I wouldn’t believe it, except I’ve seen it. One of Google’s chiefs comes from Maryland, from Rockville, I believe. Many of the people at the top of the web as we know it – the chief of Amazon, of Alexa and of other such outfits, are linked to each other.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could just call into WordPress and say, do x, y, and z, to that blog post/blogger.
you must be doing something right if you are a disinfo target!!
but I don’t believe this DOS style attacks (denial of service) which begin with a probe, which is what you evidently experienced, have anything to do with you per se. I think all self-managed websites are probed for their weaknesses by hackers and/or government assets, for their own petty purposes.
I have discovered that corporate IT infrastructure management, more than individuals, can protect against that far better as previously noted.
Why waste your energy dealing with this issue —- when your time is far more valuable and better spent in generating the content for which people come to read your opinion?
While what you indicate may be true, “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could just call into WordPress and say, do x, y, and z, to that blog post/blogger”, but then it is also true that if the powers that be want, they can shut anyone down, now legally too, regardless of where and how you are hosted. You can be deemed an “enemy combatant” and you won’t even get your Miranda rights read to you even if you are in India.
Your concern, in my opinion, is a red herring. Once I realized that myself seveal years ago, I chose to stay with Blogger. I know that I am allowed to exist only because I am harmless, inconsequential, and irrelevent to the scheme of things. And if you think you are above that, that you are being disinfoe’d deliberately by powers that be, rather than idiots who also do the same to me, then all power to you.
But if you think and believe the same as I do, that you are allowed to exist at their mercy, be it on the web, or in life, then what’s to fear when they can shut you down anytime, anywhere? Cross that bridge when you come to it. In the meantime, why not take advantage of the security afforded by existing corporate IT infrastructure of large corporations who have armies of sw engineers managing not just the security but performance of their servers, and focus your time and attention on what is your essential contribution?
Just fyi: I chose to stay with Blogger over WordPress as my primary website, and for a while I was maintaining a mirror on WordPress (but I lost interest as it was too much work) because I like the fact that Blogger’s free templates retain my formatting, whereas wordpress free templates do not. Blogger templates also play my embedded videos without having javascript turn on by the visitors, whereas wordpress requires javascript to be turned on to play the embedded videos. Blogger also permits embeding arbitrary html code which you can use for instrumenting your website to your heart’s content, but WordPress, the last time I checked, is much more restrictive, and I don’t think they even allow it (but I may be wrong). Finally, I can edit the Blogger’s free templates and insert customizations which are not possible in WordPress free templates. They allow only the look and feel to be customized in a very limited way. In blogger you can add arbitrary customization in the templates. Anyway, all matters appropriate to geekish techies but not necessarily to poets and writers:-)
try out blogger templates and see if you like it, especially the property that you don’t need javascript to play embedded videos. That alone is worth it for me because many visitors arrive without javascript turned on without losing much functionality on my websites.
z.
Hi Z,
I don’t know what the terminology of such attacks is but they didn’t deny me service.
I closed down the blog myself to give me time to secure it.
Yes, I know we’re allowed to exist on the web and I know that we don’t pose any insurmountable threat to the powers-that-be, regardless of what we write, because ultimately they establish the narrative in the major media with the millions and that’s what counts at first, not the handful who raise objections.
However, information is information and certain dots connected do indeed cause problems.
That is why a bullet was put through Gary Webb’s head. That is how Danny Colaruso ended up dead. That is perhaps why Mark Lombardi committed suicide.
Stuart Bramhall was harassed for years, according to her book, for her activism. I blogged about Margaret Newsham, a whistleblower.
Don’t believe “nothing can be done” and that we all exist at the behest of the powers that be.
They would like you to believe that but it’s not true.
If anything, we give power to such people.
I know that certain specific facts pertaining to certain people/outfits are not welcome.
I have seen certain posts manipulated in ways that would need Google’s knowing connivance. That was no bot.
So I would be worried that on wordpress.com or blogger, I could be immediately shut down. With my current hosting site, it wouldn’t be immediate.
I don’t think even under current law anyone can be shut down AT ONCE through legal means. Only through criminal or extra-legal means or with a broad construction of the law. Besides, even if they could shut you down, they cannot do it easily without drawing attention to that person and thus reinforcing their commentary. It’s easier just to ignore them.
Legal means would take at least a few days, would leave at least a few tracks, and would be subject to at least something of a fight.
I will take even a small chance to fight, rather than abject surrender.
Going to Blogger, Google, and wordpress.com seems like a bit of a surrender to me.
The code writing freedom doesn’t help because I know nothing about all that stuff.
WordPress also has a clear record of all edits with time stamps.
Anyway, I’ll think about it.